Freak Show review: High school comedy lacks the daring of its own central character

Dir: Trudie Styler, 91 mins, starring Alex Lawther, Abigail Breslin, Ian Nelson, Celia Weston, Willa Fitzgerald, Laverne Cox

“I am going to take you on a little ride I call my life,” Billy Bloom (Alex Lawther) declares early on in Trudie Styler’s debut feature. He is a flamboyant, cross-dressing teenager, devoted to his equally flamboyant mother (Bette Midler), or “Muv” as he calls her. She is a “living testament to grace, glamour and Gucci”.

The hitch is that she is also a money-grubbing alcoholic who has vanished overnight from his life. He has been left with his hugely wealthy but dour father (Larry Pine), who prefers fly fishing to fashion parades and can’t accept the idea his son may be gay.

Freak Show is a rambling, indulgent, occasionally charming, high school/coming-of-age comedy-drama. Most of its best moments come courtesy of Lawther as the young Oscar Wilde quoting “gender obliviator”. Billy ends up enrolled in a deeply conservative southern high school. He tends to prefer fur coats and corsets to conventional school uniform. If he is writing a letter, he will make sure to perfume it first.

Lawther’s performance is like a junior version of that of John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant. It combines high camp, ironic wit and vulnerability The other students are very suspicious of this glitter wearing, lip-glossed newcomer in their midst and they bully him relentlessly to hide their unease.

Styler makes excessive use of slow-motion sequences in which Billy Bloom sashays down the school corridors in his latest extravagant costume, being mocked by the other kids as he walks on by. While Billy himself is an original, exotic creation, the other students are all familiar caricatures that we’ve seen in dozens of other tales of anguished American adolescence.

There is the high school football star, Flip Kelly (Ian Nelson), who turns out to have a sensitive side and to like abstract expressionism; there is a trio of scheming, bitchy types who torment Billy at every opportunity. Their leader Lynette (Abigail Breslin) has been planning for years to become “homecoming queen”. Then, there are the “jocks,” the aggressively heterosexual conformists who can’t cope with somebody as different and subversive as Billy.

In one strange scene, former bad boy of tennis John McEnroe turns up on screen, playing the school’s PE teacher. “You’re supposed to me a man,” he yells at Billy, who pays not the blindest bit of attention.

The latter part of the film, in which Billy decides to stand as homecoming queen himself, is predictable in the extreme. He finds pockets of support among the “shadow people,” fellow students who sympathise with him but lack the courage to express themselves. He makes a rousing speech. The bullies get at least a measure of comeuppance.

Tolerance and reconciliation prevail over prejudice in the most glib manner imaginable. The film itself lacks the daring of its own central character as it moves into the realm of feel-good high school fantasy.

Freak Show hits UK cinemas 22 June