Jonathan Butterell (2021)
The title character wants to be a drag queen. In ‘Don’t Even Know It’, the opening number in Jonathan Butterell’s screen version of the hit stage musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, sixteen-year-old Jamie New sits through a careers session at his Sheffield school imagining his dream coming true. You expect the film to chart the ups, downs and successful conclusion of a journey from fantasy to drag-performer reality, and so it does. Except that Jamie makes his public debut – as Mimi Me – about halfway through; after that, suspense centres on whether he’ll attend his school prom en travesti. When he defies authority to do so, it’s another triumph for him but a rather puzzling one (that also brings to mind distracting memories of the very recent The Prom). Given what Jamie longs to become, it’s odd that his stage performance at a social club drag night is the fish before the meat of his prom appearance. Given the advice of his mentor that ‘A boy in a dress is someone to be laughed at but a drag queen is someone to be feared’, it’s striking that Jamie wears a demure frock and doesn’t wear a big-hair wig to the prom – that he turns up as a boy in a dress. This is one of several elements in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie that don’t articulate, though the story and some of the performances are engaging, and I enjoyed most of the music.
The stage show, with books and lyrics by Tom MacRae and music by Dan Gillespie Sells, was inspired by a BBC3 documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, whose subject was a teenager, Jamie Campbell, growing up in the market town of Bishop Auckland, in County Durham. That’s Billy Elliot territory and the people behind Everybody’s Talking probably figured they needed to find their own patch but the relocation of the action is superficial – Jonathan Butterell includes establishing shots of Sheffield but the cultural environment suggests small town rather than big city. The BBC3 documentary aired in 2011, so Jamie Campbell must have been born around 1995. Jamie New’s story apparently takes place in the present day, which makes him the best part of a decade younger, but Butterell and Tom MacRae, who did the screenplay, largely ignore the accelerating mainstreaming of drag entertainment in recent years. To give an obvious example: when Jamie Campbell was in his early teens, RuPaul’s Drag Race was in its infancy. According to the website of the Apollo Theatre where the stage musical is still running, Jamie ‘overcomes prejudice, beats the bullies and steps out of the darkness’. In order to do that, he must, of course, be seriously up against it, so a back-of-beyond, tenebrous atmosphere is crucial. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even in Jamie’s benighted neck of the woods, drag night at the local social club appears to be a regular event.
Nearly every number is a piece of self-assertion or threnody to the challenges of realising your true self. The music is, fortunately, more varied – there are catchy, jolly tunes and plangent melodies. And the lyrics, though they harp on the same theme, are sometimes witty. The song score isn’t memorable (as I’ve already discovered) but, while the film’s going on, it compares favourably with other recent musical releases like In the Heights and Annette, even if that’s damning with faint praise. The dancing, choreographed by Kate Prince, is energetic without exhausting the viewer. The fantasy numbers work well on the screen but things get overcomplicated in ‘This Was Me’, the one song that’s new for the film (several numbers in the stage show aren’t included). In search of a prom dress, Jamie (Max Harwood) visits the dilapidated costume store run by Hugo Battersby (Richard E Grant); they get into conversation about Jamie’s ambitions and Hugo’s career as drag queen Loco Chanelle, the springtime of which is commemorated on VHS tapes that Hugo shows Jamie. The videos also show the young Hugo/Loco (John McCrea) at the bedside of his dying boyfriend, news film of St Diana meeting AIDS patients and, eventually, the older Hugo watching his younger self within the grainy footage.
The main source of confusion, though, is the song’s characterisation of the AIDS crisis. Holly Johnson (heard but not seen) contributes to the vocals, which imparts the right period feel, but the lyrics bizarrely suggest all was well until much later than it actually was. The song begins:
‘Let me tell you how it used to go
Freddie playing on the radio
The Iron Lady couldn’t stop the show’
and goes on to describe a hedonistic paradise:
‘We were sinners playing in the sun
Kept on partying till ’91
Until that fateful day’
before concluding that:
‘We were peacocks in exotic herds
Wouldn’t listen to the warning words
That’s the problem with such pretty birds
They always fly away
Even Freddie couldn’t stay.’
In other words, Freddie Mercury’s death signifies the-day-the-music-died – years after the start of AIDS activism, through Act Up etc. It’s only to be expected that, on receipt of this history lesson, Jamie, who seems never to have heard of AIDS, is himself confused. He reports back to his friend Pritti Pasha (Lauren Patel) that some of his drag-artist ancestors ‘actually died’ for the cause – as if wearing women’s clothes made you HIV-positive. (The remark unintentionally evokes the kind of mad, hysterical theories about the disease that really did circulate in the 1980s.)
Jamie’s chief source of moral support is his devoted mother Margaret (Sarah Lancashire), who’s had to cope on her own since Wayne (Ralph Ineson), her husband and Jamie’s father, left them to set up house with a younger woman. Jamie has known Pritti since they were in primary school and she’s his only teenage friend. They’re classmates and soulmates, bullied or derided by the other Year 11 kids – Jamie for having come out as gay (this before he reveals his drag queen hopes), Pritti because she works hard (she wants to be a doctor) and wears the hijab. The rancidly abusive Dean Paxton (Samuel Bottomley) slags off Pritti as, among other things, fat, which she’s not, and a virgin, which she freely admits to being. When Margaret buys her son a pair of sparkly red high heels (aka ruby slippers), Jamie shows them to Pritti. It’s a surprise that she’s surprised by these and to hear him describe himself as ‘a boy who sometimes wants to be a girl’. Pritti admits to finding it ‘weird’ but, within a couple of screen minutes, has not only absorbed the news but is singing a number (‘Spotlight’) that exhorts Jamie to seize the day:
‘I know it’s not easy, but I know you’re strong
And I know that somewhere they’re playing your song
Out of the darkness, into the spotlight
Everyone’s waiting, jamming
In a place where you belong.’
Max Harwood, whose first screen role this is, proves himself a confident and proficient singer, dancer and actor, though he looks a little too old for Jamie: he was coming up twenty-two when filming took place in 2019. (The release has been delayed by the best part of a year from the date originally planned – a consequence of Covid and, subsequently, a transfer of distribution rights, which Disney sold to Amazon.) Harwood also seems, in two ways, too polished. Although he hadn’t done the role in the theatre, his accomplished playing gives an impression akin to that of an actor whose performance has been fully worked out in a stage run, and lacks freshness when reprised on screen. Harwood’s appearance is more prepossessing and more robust than the teenage Jamie Campbell’s. From the very first school scene, Harwood’s bleached-blonde Jamie looks as if he knows who he is, what he wants and is eager for attention: he sits at a desk at the back of the classroom but he’s every inch a performer-in-waiting. When in due course he goes on stage as Mimi Me, Jamie’s change of appearance is very striking but this isn’t a Cinderella transformation. The character does plenty of soul-searching and self-doubting but Max Harwood’s face only occasionally shows you a frightened kid. He’s more expressive in these moments – it’s a pity there aren’t more of them.
The lead’s limitations are more salient because there’s some strong naturalistic acting going on around him – but that raises other difficulties. Sarah Lancashire and Ralph Ineson make the roles of Jamie’s parents more substantial than the writing of them. The same is true, among the younger cast, of Samuel Bottomley as Dean. Lauren Patel’s Pritti is very likeable but you’re always aware that she’s in the story only as a bullied-for-being-different makeweight, and to act as Jamie’s occasional confidante; Dean, like Margaret and Wayne, isn’t as simple as that. The three actors concerned enrich Everybody’s Talking but they also throw a spanner in the works by raising issues that the film clearly isn’t concerned to explore. This trio of unresolved characters became more interesting to me than Jamie, whose happy ending is predetermined.
In conversations with her friend Ray (Shobna Gulati), Margaret is pleasantly unremarkable; in her scenes with Jamie, Sarah Lancashire always conveys a remarkable depth of mother love. This culminates in Margaret’s solo ‘He’s My Boy’, which Lancashire delivers beautifully. The lyrics are a sometimes startling description of Margaret’s feelings for her only child, the person her world revolves around:
‘And maybe he’ll break my heart
‘Cause he’ll take my heart
When he goes
It’s cruel that he can but that’s just like a man …’
Margaret’s ex-husband’s new partner (Charlotte Salt) is now pregnant. Wayne is hoping for the son he always wanted and didn’t get with Jamie. Margaret desperately tries to conceal from Jamie that his father wants nothing to do with him; when Jamie finds this out for himself, he takes it out on his mother. Though it’s obviously necessary for plotting purposes, Jamie’s unawareness of his rejection isn’t too credible, especially in light of ‘Wall in My Head’, an effective number that he sings early on about his father’s influence, and a flashback to childhood when Wayne catches the younger Jamie (Noah Leggott) at Margaret’s dressing table, trying on her clothes and make-up. Still, it’s a powerful moment when, once Jamie does know the truth, he decides to confront his father at a soccer game, running onto the pitch in lipstick and a girlified arrangement of the team strip. Wayne’s horrified reaction and sense of shame, when one of his mates looks sideways at him, are bleakly eloquent. Jamie’s distress here is a highlight of Max Harwood’s performance.
It’s not unusual in prejudice drama for bigotry to be represented by just one or two characters, which tends to defeat the object of dramatising the endemic nature of the prejudice in question (The Help syndrome). Everybody’s Talking About Jamie takes a somewhat different approach. Although Dean Paxton always takes the lead in vicious name-calling, he has the support of classmates at the start. Dean and some other lads heckle Jamie at the social club, and get thrown out. Yet by the time Year 11 turns up at the entrance to the prom, Dean is Jamie’s (and Pritti’s) lone detractor. The material requires that, in order to overcome adversity in an emotionally satisfying way, Jamie change hearts and minds. Because the film-makers don’t make clear how he does that, they allow a more cynical interpretation. In the opening careers session sequence, the teacher Miss [sic] Hedge (Sharon Horgan) takes her class to task for their impractical ambitions – they want to be YouTubers and so on, rather than do boring steady jobs. The enthusiastic title song is performed by Year 11 following Jamie’s debut as Mimi Me. Are his classmates won over because he has succeeded in getting the kind of attention they long for?
Even Dean, once Jamie and Pritti are admitted to the prom, admits defeat. He agrees to dance with Jamie. Dean also takes on the chin Pritti’s joke about his allegedly small penis – an allegation previously made in a spat with Jamie in the school cafeteria. How well Samuel Bottomley captures Dean’s loss of face on that first occasion is an early indication that this will be a more nuanced brute than might be expected. Bottomley is good again in a scene with Miss Hedge, when Dean tells her he’s not going to bother sitting his maths GCSE – he knows he won’t pass because ‘I’m thick, miss’. She persuades him to give it a go – they shake on it. There’s no follow-up to this at all, except that, in Dean’s taking down by Jamie and Pritti at the prom, they remind him that he has no future beyond Year 11. But you remember Dean’s glum, resigned handshake with his teacher.
Not all the supporting performances work. Richard E Grant seems uncomfortable in one half of his key role as Jamie’s fairy godparent. Grappling with a camp Yorkshire accent is probably the basic problem – anyway, Grant’s Hugo is vocally laboured. He’s better in full drag at the social club, where Loco Chanelle commères proceedings, pep-talking a nervous Jamie backstage and coming up, on the spot, with a stage name for him. At the start, Miss Hedge seems no more than reasonably concerned about her students’ unrealistic hopes and dreams. She morphs into a quasi-martinet, who puts the mealy-mouthed head teacher (Adeel Akhtar, excellent, as usual) firmly in his place: the implication is that Miss Hedge is in love with the rulebook because her life is otherwise unfulfilled. She’s been played on stage by performers as different as Michelle Visage, Katy Brand and Faye Tozer (among others). Tozer might be thought too conventionally attractive for the role – Sharon Horgan certainly is. When Miss Hedge informs her class she’s wearing Jimmy Choo shoes, shouldn’t she and her footwear be a laughable mismatch (which they’re not)? It’s baffling to hear Jamie tell the teacher he can smell her coming because he gets the whiff of desperation. On prom night, when Miss Hedge eventually relents by letting Jamie and his dress in, this doesn’t feel like either the vanquishing of a villain or the surrender of a loser.
The one character who unequivocally fails to see the light is Jamie’s father. Jonathan Butterell presents Wayne as a hopeless case: we last see him walk away from his son and the camera, and out of the story. Yet Ralph Ineson plays this dislikeable and unhappy man with such integrity that he exposes the facile feelgood mechanics at work in the film. ‘What’s wrong with liking boys’ things?’ Wayne asks Margaret in their one scene together. The sequence is awkwardly staged: for people estranged in more ways than one (and whose conversation here is fraught but not aggressive), they’re standing too close to each other. Wayne’s question is nonetheless interesting, though, because it points up the limits (and fatuity) of the be-whoever-you-really-are message that the story is pushing. This is encapsulated in the name of the hero’s stage alter ego – ‘Me-Me-Me’ – but Everybody’s Talking About Jamie doesn’t want everyone to be their true selves. Although it has a go at Miss Hedge, it dodges the issue of whether she’s right to tell her pupils to get real or of whether getting real is unnatural to them. And it certainly doesn’t accept the principle of ‘I am what I am’ in the case of Wayne: it says, rather, good riddance to bad rubbish. You don’t have to feel sympathy for Jamie’s father’s point of view to see a double standard at work here. Which ‘identities’ are to be celebrated or accepted, and which are infra dig, is always going to be changing with the times. Making a selection doesn’t change – it’s either foolish or disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
29 September 2021
