Everybody’s Talk­ing About Jamie

This Bil­ly Elliot-esque sto­ry, adapt­ed from Tom MacRae and Dan Gille­spie Sells’ hit West End show (itself inspired by Jen­ny Popplewell’s 2011 BBC doc­u­men­tary Jamie: Drag Queen at 16), is sit­u­at­ed in work­ing-class Sheffield.

We meet Jamie (Max Har­wood) return­ing home from his paper round on the morn­ing of his 16^th birth­day. He’s greet­ed with a bear hug from his sup­port­ive moth­er (Sarah Lan­cashire) and gift­ed a pair of glit­tery, Dorothy-red high heels. It is the con­fir­ma­tion of his plans to become a drag queen and wear a dress to his school prom.

The school can­teen becomes his dance floor and the class­room trans­forms into a run­way as Jamie day­dreams about a life on stage. While his absent father (Ralph Ine­son), lousy careers advis­er (Sharon Hor­gan) and homo­pho­bic school bul­ly (Samuel Bot­tom­ley) strive to scup­per Jamie’s dreams, his adorable best friend Prit­ti (Lau­ren Patel) encour­ages him in all his forms of self-expression.

Shav­ing around 20 min­utes off of the stage production’s run­time, Everybody’s Talk­ing About Jamie is chore­o­graphed with a sharp stac­ca­to rhythm that excus­es the need for an inter­mis­sion. In attempt­ing to top the musical’s big num­bers, how­ev­er, the film slips into some unnec­es­sar­i­ly flashy set-pieces (one involv­ing a ran­dom black-and-white cut as Jamie is marched to the headmaster’s office) that do lit­tle to ser­vice the sto­ry. The music video-style sequences meld into one hyper-stylised blur.

The film real­ly shines in its more under­stat­ed moments, when sparkling new­com­er new­com­er Max Har­wood and the rest of cast are giv­en the floor. Lan­cashire in par­tic­u­lar impress­es with a ten­der ren­di­tion of the moth­er-to-son bal­lad ​‘He’s My Boy’, while Richard E Grant steals the show as Hugo aka vet­er­an drag queen Miss Loco Chanelle.

In one visu­al­ly-arrest­ing sequence, Jamie ven­tures into Hugo’s mem­o­ries. The pair become embed­ded in VHS footage show­ing par­ties dur­ing the late 1980s and ear­ly ​’90s, through which the AIDS pan­dem­ic is chron­i­cled. It’s a brief but touch­ing moment that pro­vides vital his­tor­i­cal con­text for both Jamie and the film’s younger view­ers – a reminder of a shared trau­ma that remains etched into the LGBTQ+ community’s col­lec­tive conscience.

Such evoca­tive moments make Everybody’s Talk­ing About Jamie a wor­thy cin­e­mat­ic trans­la­tion. Its core mes­sage of self-accep­tance and sup­port­ive guardian­ship will inevitably be more acces­si­ble to young peo­ple on the screen than it is on stage.