“This story really happened…then we added the singing and dancing.”
This text, which appears over a black screen before any other image, does more work to justify Everybody’s Talking About Jamie as a musical than most contemporary movie musicals can accomplish over their entire runtime. Combining the forms of musicals and film presents a unique challenge to balance a heightened song world with a cinematic realism while finding a consistent language for transitioning between the two. Stage choreographer and director Jonathan Butterell aptly brings his theatrical background to the screen for a dazzling feature film debut that stands among the best movie musicals of the year.
Jamie New (Max Harwood) is a 16-year old openly gay student from Sheffield, England, who dreams of becoming a drag queen. In an early scene when Jamie’s pragmatic teacher (Sharon Horgan) asks her students to share their post-school ambitions, Jamie’s imagination launches him into a fantasy daydream where he is a star, beloved and idolized by all. “Don’t Even Know It” transforms from a vacant stare out of a classroom window to an extravagant production number that evokes a pop music video featuring Jamie’s otherwise indifferent peers as his sensational backup singers and dancers. From this early moment, it’s clear that musical numbers are a part of Jamie’s expression of the dreams he visualizes and the height of those ambitions. We can easily accept this musical language as a part of the storytelling reality of this world.
Jamie survives school life with the support of his best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel), who is similarly ostracized by her schoolmates for being Muslim and hyper fixated on getting good grades so she can become a doctor. When Jamie’s mother gifts him a glittering pair of red high heels for his birthday, Jamie informs Pritti that he wants to come out for a second time, now as a drag queen, at their school prom. Looking for a dress to wear, Jamie finds a drag shop called “House of Loco,” where he meets shop owner Hugo (Richard E. Grant), an aging drag queen who eagerly becomes a mentor to Jamie. When the school catches word of Jamie’s plans to attend the prom in drag, the administration quickly commands that Jamie attend in a suit and tie just like the other boys.
Jamie lives alone with his mother (Sarah Lancashire), who is incredibly supportive of her son’s sexual orientation and his journey to further express himself as a drag queen. Jamie’s father (Ralph Ineson) is about to have a son from another relationship and has chosen to abandon his parental role in Jamie’s life as he readily awaits a second chance to have the kind of stereotypically masculine son that he always wanted, but felt like Jamie could never become. Jamie still seeks his father’s love and acceptance while, unbeknown to him, his mother lies and covers for her ex-husband to create the illusion that birthday cards and opening night flowers are actually coming from Jamie’s father.
Much of the film’s joy can be attributed to the delightfully earnest performances from the entire central cast. This feels like a star turn for Max Harwood, who carries the film with delicacy and prowess as both Jamie and his drag persona, Mimi Me. Richard E. Grant is as heartbreaking and endearing as he’s ever been, and Sarah Lancashire stands her ground as the single mother who would do anything to protect her son. The songs are mostly great, each falling somewhere different along the British pop and musical theatre spectrum. Most of Jamie’s musical world consists of driving pop melodies, even as he explores personal trauma in “Wall in My Head.” Pritti’s “Spotlight” and “It Means Beautiful” are simple and tender musical theatre songs, while Jamie’s mother gets more of a traditional musical theatre powerhouse ballad in the form of the 11 o’clock number, “He’s My Boy.” A pair of songs for Hugo recalls the pop power-ballads of singers from the 70s and 80s like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury.
One exceptionally crafted sequence is a new song written for the film called “This Was Me,” which begins in Hugo’s shop as he shows Jamie a VHS tape from his glory days as Loco Chanelle titled “Adventures of the Warrior Queen.” The camera pushes into the television set, and we are transported to the drag revolution of the late 1980s, captured by a roaming handheld camcorder that finds Loco in the peak of her fame and present-day Hugo and Jamie as onlookers. What starts as a triumphant depiction of artistic liberation moves into demonstrations of gay rights activism before taking a sobering turn in the early 1990s as the aids epidemic completely shatters the community. We pull back from the television set to end the song with Hugo, broken by the memory of all that’s lost. The inclusion of Hugo and Jamie throughout the video footage is a beautiful artistic choice that shows how Jamie is connected to the generations of people who lived and died for him to have a place in the world. It’s a turning point for Jamie, whose passion for drag turns into a much deeper understanding of the legacy he now carries into the future.
While the film does stumble through a series of clichés in its final act and some of the more antagonizing relationships resolve with sudden ease, the wholeheartedness of the finale is still well-earned and entirely infectious. As a story of self-acceptance and rising above the walls built by others to contain, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is as sincere as it is glamorous. One hopes the accessibility of an Amazon Prime release, compared to the relative inaccessibility of live theatre, means that those who need to see this film will be able to find it. So they too may step “out of the darkness and into the spotlight.”
