Everybody’s Talking About Jamie review: A dazzling musical spectacle
Despite utter CATastrophes like 2019’s Cats, Hollywood seems undeterred from churning out Broadway film adaptions: 2021 feels like the year of the movie-musical. From Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights to the hotly debated festival premiere of Dear Evan Hansen, musical theatre aficionados can get their fill of Broadway on the big screen in 2021. But this year’s best movie-musical isn’t a massive blockbuster title from the American theatre scene. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a spirited, heartfelt, dazzling musical spectacle with stellar direction and a magnetic lead performance.
Based on the West End musical of the same name, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie follows 16-year-old Jamie (Max Harwood), a small-town student with aspirations of becoming a drag queen. When Jamie decides to attend the school dance in drag, fellow students and faculty members try to stop him from realizing his artistic dreams, but with the help of best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel), devoted mother Margaret (Sarah Lancashire), and local drag veteran Hugo (Richard E Grant), Jamie takes on bigotry and looks fabulous doing it.
When it comes to movie adaptions of live musical theatre, most films struggle with how to properly block and capture elaborate dance numbers that are meant to be performed on stage – but Everybody’s Talking About Jamie makes it immediately clear that it’s a film with no such issues – making extensive use of clever lighting and production design to not just showcase the numbers, but bring a new depth to them that simply couldn’t have been accomplished on stage.
The refreshingly competent musical numbers are thanks in no small part to the presence of director/choreographer Jonathan Butterell, who directed the stage version of the musical while it was still in its infancy at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. As the ghosts of Broadway past have shown us, finding the proper director for a musical adaption is no small feat, and Butterell couldn’t be better suited for the job – despite the fact that it’s his film directorial debuts his lively, innovative direction and obvious familiarity with the music and story does an abundance of good when it comes to helping establish the film’s tone and sense of self.
Such strong direction goes a long way in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie‘s case particularly, because, on its own, the film’s story and lyrics aren’t all that impressive. Drag queens are no stranger to being the focus of Broadway musicals – from Kinky Boots to Tootsie, drag on stage is by no means novel, and Jamie‘s story isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. The songs themselves also aren’t all that remarkable – the lyrics feel pedestrian at times, but the vivacity that Butterell injects the numbers with helps elevate what may have otherwise fallen flat.
There’s an infectious positivity to Everybody’s Talking About Jamie that makes it a delightful watch – its protagonist is the perfect combination of spunky, vulnerable, and bold that even though we’ve heard this story before, we want to experience it again through the film’s retelling. Jamie, crucially, also pays significant homage and respect to drag’s roots in ballroom culture and the struggles the LGBTQ+ community endured during the AIDS crisis.
The film explores the more recent phenomena of young aspiring queens wanting to get into drag for the Instagram fame and the aesthetics and not fully appreciating the history and struggle that paved the way for the art of drag, but through Richard E. Grant’s character Hugo, both Jamie and the audience are able to fully appreciate how much strife went into getting the drag scene to where it is today.
Grant, to his credit, is without question the film’s standout supporting character – he’s certainly an unorthodox casting choice to play an aging drag diva, but he strikes the perfect mix of sincerity and campy drag theatricality to make for a mentor figure that’s both compelling and entertaining. The other guiding presence in Jamie’s life is his mother Margaret, around whom the film’s central conflict revolves – Jamie has an absentee father who he believes is supportive of his queer identity and drag aspirations, when in reality, he’s a bigot and Margaret has been forging letters of support over the years.
Though the scale of the conflict is relatively small, the deeply personal nature of Jamie and Margaret’s clash makes it riveting fare for the film’s emotional core, and Sarah Lancashire’s performance as Jamie’s mother sells both their unbreakable bond and the conflict as a whole. Her singing voice may not be anything particularly special (in fact, the entire cast is strong but not stellar in the vocal department) but the flaws in vocals are more than made up for by the strength of the performances themselves.
As the titular Jamie, Max Harwood is the embodiment of this phenomenon: he gives a genuinely moving performance that would be remarkable even without the musical component. Though not all that complicated of a character, Harwood brings a depth and dimension to Jamie that makes him a magnetic lead – easy to root for but also deeply, relatably flawed with a kind of deep-seated vulnerability that battles it out with his ambition and drive to become a star. We’re not sure what Harwood’s career will look like from here, but if it’s up to us he’d be headed for big things: like Jamie himself, Harwood is a luminous star in the making.
It may not be the most grandiose or ambitious musical to be put to film, but there’s an unapologetic passion, scrappiness, and ferocity in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie that takes a small, sweet show and transforms it into what’s without a doubt the best movie-musical of 2021. With cleverly staged musical numbers, sharp direction and choreography, and a cast full of grade-A talent that elevates the material to new, exciting heights, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a triumphant movie musical that’s more than worthy to bear the stage production’s name.