It was shot for $2 million and revolves around a teenage drag queen. But Freak Show is hardly niche.
Trudie Styler (making her directing debut) is a schmoozer not a loser. She wants Bette Midler for a key role? She gets Midler! Which prompts the thought: be careful what you wish for.
Anyway, Styler did well to cast Alex Lawther in the lead. The droopy-eyed Brit is stunning as Billy Bloom, a self-conscious mummy’s boy from Connecticut, forced to live with his strait-laced dad in the conservative American South.
Lawther is 23 but can still pass comfortably for an adolescent. If you’ve seen him in The Imitation Game, X+Y, Ghost Stories or, more recently, The End Of The F***ing World, you’ll know his big forehead always looks crammed with thoughts. What keeps spinning is his moral compass. I think it’s those fidgety lips.
In a standout sequence Billy (as part of a school assignment) performs a self-penned Zelda Fitzgerald monologue and gets top marks. If Lawther was less talented, the praise heaped on Billy’s performance might feel OTT. As it is, we just want to share in the whooping.
Lawther is subtle. The film? Not so much. In the second half Billy wakes up in hospital after a brutal attack by his homophobic classmates. The beating itself is well-shot and almost erotically atmospheric. The silly bit is that, just in the nick of time, he’s saved by the jock of his dreams, gorgeous Flip (Ian Nelson). Soon Billy is bonding with his dad thanks to the intervention of the family’s redoubtable maid.
Just as hard to swallow is the downfall of Billy’s initially beloved mum (Midler). Thanks to lazy lines and a turn from the 72-year-old actress that can only be described as completely shite, grotesque “Muv” has nothing to do with the real world.
Luckily, Freak Show’s memorable moments work splendidly in isolation. Billy is ultimately a variation on Rebel Without a Cause’s troubled rich kid “Plato”, whose great act of defiance was to decorate his school locker with a photo of Alan Ladd. We’ve come a long way, baby.
