Mark Reviews Movies: EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2021

There's a lot to admire about the story of Everybody's Talking About Jamie, which is a low-stakes affair about a gay, newly-16-year-old boy who tries to make good on his dreams of becoming a drag queen. He likes to dress in women's clothing and has since he was younger. At some point, the teen discovered one could do that professionally. He's going to come out (for a second time) by wearing a dress to prom.

There's no villain here, aside from an ignorant school bully and a rule-obsessed teacher and an absentee father who has given up on his son. There's no real external obstacle or challenge, apart from some third-act complications involving a prom. If there's a battle to be fought here, it's the protagonist's internal struggle to build up confidence and, later, not let his ego get the better of him. This is story that actually cares about its characters, and it cares enough about them that its only real concern is whether or not they care about and for themselves.

It's also a musical, based on a stage show by writer/lyricist Tom MacRae (who adapted it for the screen) and composer Dan Gillespie Sells. It is this aspect, though, that does give the movie some limitations and a bit too much distracting artificiality.

The songs, with a distinctly rock-and-roll bent, are fine—even quite good in certain cases. They're even and often about the characters—their fears and desires, their pasts and what they want from the future, what they know for sure and the conflicts within them that will never be resolved. There's a rather bittersweet tune early in the movie, in which Jamie New (newcomer Max Harwood, in an admirably ordinary performance) explains his own internal conflict in terms of a metaphor: a wall in his head.

It started, as a child, with a single, unheard word or phrase from the father (played by Ralph Ineson) that has since abandoned him. That was the first brick, and as the years progressed, more and more bricks were added from more words and phrases. Director Jonathan Butterell (who also oversaw the original stage production in England) has Jamie looking through the windows of his home, watching himself as a boy go through these events, but when we arrive at the hopeful part of the metaphor, Jamie is looking out at the sunset over the small town of Sheffield.

Yes, there's a wall in his head, but that's just something he now can and is ready to climb. It's quite lovely.

The rest of the story is mostly and equally optimistic. Jamie's mother Margaret (Sarah Lancashire) supports her son and his plans for the future. His best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel) thinks his desire to dress as a woman is a bit "weird" but no weirder than anything about herself, and an aging and retired drag queen named Hugo (Richard E. Grant) becomes Jamie's mentor and gets the teen his first chance to perform.

On the opposite side, classmate Dean (Samuel Bottomley) makes plenty of cruel jokes (which Jamie mostly dismisses, until they become too much), while his teacher Miss Hedge (Sharon Horgan) thinks Jamie's prom idea would distract from the other attendees' experience. Unlike Dean and Jamie's father, she's not a bigot—just a bit too pragmatic for her own good or the dreams of her students.

On the melancholy side, Margaret—after a lot of forlorn stares make us think she's going sing—finally reveals how trying it can be to be Jamie's mother, and Pritti has a lonesome moment that perhaps suggests she might see her friend as more than that. Hugo takes Jamie through a home-video tour of the 1980s and '90s, as drag queens have to fight the system and the epidemic that threaten to destroy them.

We understand these characters, with and without songs, and accept those more intimate tunes, because Butterell doesn't try to distract from their purpose with a lot of flash or showy gimmickry. When the movie simply exists in this mode, it's strong and effective.

It's not always in that mode, though, because, as a musical, it also, apparently, requires some big numbers, with lots of flash and showy gimmickry. Whether it's Jamie imagining himself as a celebrity (with a classroom's fluorescent lights turning to neon and a bright sign announcing "The Jamie Show") and a work of art (a somewhat surreal black-and-white sequence with disembodied arms holding camera-flashing cellphones) or the entire school spreading rumors via song and dance, we get those numbers.

They offer little to the story or the characters, regardless of how catchy the songs accompanying them may be (The title tune is quite so). The limitations of such perceived necessities within the medium of musical theater are in how much these bigger sequences divert and distance us from the core of this tale. The limitations within the adaptation's new medium are in Butterell's direction, which employs a lot of fast cutting and crowding on the screen, overshadowing the very point of such numbers—to see the performers perform.

Musicals intrinsically present a barrier to realism, and it's up to filmmakers to break that down or, as with Jamie's mind-wall, overcome it. At its core, Everybody's Talking About Jamie understands that idea, but the movie's particulars don't always accomplish it.

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