Going nowhere | 3 March 2012

The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 — the summer I turned 16, as it happens — so I expected at least some of it to resonate, but its characters are so unfinished and improbabilities so plentiful and narrative so unoriginal it’s like an extended episode of Fame, only worse. I do feel rotten about saying this, yes, as it’s obviously been made with affection, and its heart is in the right place, but as I tell myself whenever I kick a puppy or drown a kitten, ‘If it needs doing it needs doing, and it’s not so bad when you get down to it.’