‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is a superstar adaptation and you don’t even know it (yet)

Bringing a beloved musical from stage to screen is no mean feat, especially with the likes of In The Heights raising the bar for screen musicals. London’s West End favourite Everybody’s Talking About Jamie may not have been seen on stage by U.S. audiences on Broadway, but thanks to a new film adaptation, it’s about to go global.

Amazon Studios’ Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is based on the hit musical by Dan Gillespie and Tom McRae, a story that was in turn inspired by a documentary about teenager Jamie Campbell aka Fifi la True. Director of the stage version Jonathan Butterell makes his big screen debut with this film, with Gillespie and McRae in tow, and the onscreen version makes some strong choices.

Set in Sheffield, England, the musical follows 16-year-old Jamie New, who is on a quest to become a drag queen. Supported by his best friend Pritti, his loving mum Margaret, and her best friend Ray, Jamie knows exactly who he is despite living in a relatively conservative English town and attending Mayfield School, where homophobic bullying is literally shrugged off by teachers, where teachers shut down any variance from gender conformity.

Newcomer Max Harwood is wonderful as Jamie New (“the boy so nice he came out twice!”), bringing range, nuance, and genuine heart to the titular character, trying to find his feet in life while wearing a red sparkling pair of birthday heels.

The birthday heels!
Credit: John Rogers

Happy Valley‘s Sarah Lancashire is well cast as Jamie’s supportive mum, Margaret, who loves her “best chuffing son ever” to bits — so much so that she covers for his crappy, intentionally absent father (Game of Thrones’ Ralph Ineson). Margaret encourages Jamie to feel free to be himself, as does her best friend Ray (Shobna Gulati, who frankly doesn’t get enough to do on screen).

Richard E. Grant brings his signature theatricality to his portrayal of Hugo aka Miss Loco Chanelle. Hugo helps Jamie along his winding path through hesitance, then self-loathing to find confidence both in drag and out of it, but also importantly educates Jamie of the long road paved by warrior drag queens of decades past.

“Drag is not just a TV show, it’s a revolution,” Jamie comes to appreciate. Notably, director Butterell has replaced the stage song “The Legend of Loco Chanelle (and the Blood Red Dress)” with a brand new song by Gillespie for the film called “This Was Me,” an historic reflection paired with ‘home video’ footage from Loco Chanelle’s past: drag shows, marches fighting for LGBTQ rights, and heartbreaking, personal reminders of the AIDS epidemic that arrived in the UK in the ’80s and ’90s. “Even Freddie couldn’t stay,” Hugo sings in a powerful moment.

Richard E. Grant as Hugo aka Miss Loco Chanelle.
Credit: John Roger

For fans, the power harmonies in the battle-ready song “Over the Top” by the Legs Eleven ladies (the stars of the local drag night, played by drag queens Myra Dubois, Son of a Tutu, and Anna Phylactic) are still there. There’s even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in the film from drag superstar Bianca Del Rio herself, who once played the role of Hugo in the West End production. There’s a nice little hint of her cameo early on when Jamie says to Pritti, “This is Sheffield, not San Francisco. I’m Jamie New, not Bianca Del Rio.”

The usually hilarious Sharon Horgan takes on the role of conservative careers teacher Miss Hedge, pushing her Year 11 students to have “realistic expectations” about getting a “real job” that doesn’t include being a performer. But Miss Hedge’s beliefs go beyond job advice, pushing her own conservative views on the easily intimidated principal Iman Masood (Adeel Akhtar) and inhibiting Jamie from expressing himself at school, even openly mocking him for it in the flatly sinister song “Work of Art.”

Lauren Patel is strong as Jamie’s best friend Pritti, who is also bullied at school for being Muslim. She’s given a gloriously high-production, disco-ball-clad chance to nudge her friend “out of the darkness” with the sparkling ballad “Spotlight,” and is given one of the film’s best moments in the final scenes. Without spoiling anything, Pritti gets the kind of comeback moment you wish you could script for yourself, and Patel’s delivery in this scene is spot on.

Pritti (Lauren Patel) is a grand BFF.
Credit: John Rogers

The musical numbers in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie range from fully fledged choreographed dance spectacles to quiet moments sung in the kitchen. One of the most famous earworm numbers, “And You Don’t Even Know It,” is a swift parade of fluorescent colour that struts through Jamie’s big glamorous dreams, and the title song channels big High School Musical “Stick to the Status Quo” vibes in the canteen. But there are more intimate moments including “My Man, Your Boy” sung between Margaret and Jamie at the kitchen table. Some of the flashback work in ballad “The Wall in My Head” is a little half-baked, but I’ll personally be singing it in the backyard at the top of my lungs, thanks.

There are also a handful of new songs that have been added to the film, all feel-good anthems that don’t feel out of place, including Becky Hill’s “Everything” that opens the film, Todrick Hall’s banger “Werk Girl” for a montage, and Chaka Khan’s “When the Time Comes” in a moment I won’t spoil.

The film is an uplifting, poignant adaptation of a show whose core is finding the confidence (and doing the work) to step out of the darkness and into the spotlight as your truest, most excellent self. For balance, I will say there’s a shockingly bad “epileptic caterpillars” line that should have never been in the script, and some moments seem hastily sped through. But other than this, the film version of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a superstar, and you don’t even know it (yet).

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is streaming on Amazon Prime Video from Sept. 17.

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