Freak Show
Trudie Styler’s “warm-hearted” directorial debut is a “treat” for fans of the “fabulous”, said Anna Smith in Time Out. Alex Lawther plays Billy Bloom, a sensitive gay teenager who delights in dressing up in furs and feathers with his glamorous mother (Bette Midler). But when he arrives at a new school, his flamboyant ways get a frosty reception. While he befriends the school hunk (Ian Nelson), he is bullied and eventually beaten up, and decides there’s only one thing for it: he will take a stand against prejudice by entering the school’s homecoming queen contest. Freak Show’s message of tolerance feels a little preachy, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but Lawther excels as the vulnerable misfit, and the film’s incidental pleasures include an amusing cameo from one John McEnroe as a gung-ho PE teacher. It’s just a shame that Billy’s classmates seem to come straight from central casting, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. Its heart is certainly in the right place, but this rambling, feel-good drama “lacks the daring of its own central character”.
