115 min | PG-13 | September 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A teenager in Sheffield wants to skip a career day and walk the prom in heels. His mother is in his corner. His town is not. He picks the dress anyway.
Jamie New is sixteen, gay, and certain he is meant to be a drag queen. School wants him to pick a sensible job. His mother wants him to be safe and happy, and those two goals keep pulling against each other. Jonathan Butterell builds a musical out of that small council-estate world and the big gestures a teenager makes inside it. The film is about ambition with no map, and about who stays when the ambition gets loud.
Max Harwood plays Jamie with total commitment in his first screen role. He sells the bravado and then lets you see it crack when the bullies and his absent father land their hits. Sarah Lancashire plays Margaret New with quiet steel, and her best moment is a kitchen confession about the lies she has told to protect her son. Richard E. Grant plays Hugo Battersby, a retired drag queen who mentors Jamie, and he reads the dressing-room nostalgia with warmth instead of camp. Lauren Patel grounds the whole thing as Pritti Pasha, the studious best friend who refuses to perform anyone’s idea of herself.
Butterell directs from Tom MacRae’s screenplay, adapting the stage show he conceived. He fights the proscenium by staging numbers in real corridors and high streets, and the dance breaks spill out of classrooms into the wet Sheffield pavement. The production design keeps the New flat small and specific, which makes the fantasy sequences pop harder when the lighting shifts to neon. The choreography favors big unison ensemble moves over intimacy. That choice gives the film energy and costs it some of the rawness the quieter scenes find.
This is a crowd-pleaser that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing. The conflicts resolve on schedule and the message arrives wrapped and labeled. What saves it from glossy uplift is the specificity of the mother-son relationship and the refusal to make the father’s cruelty into a teachable redemption. Harwood and Lancashire give the film a center that the bigger numbers cannot match. The movie reaches for transcendence and settles for charm, and the charm is real.