A cross between The Sum Of Us and Billy Elliot, Beautiful Thing is sweetly romantic and original, and light years beyond most of its shithouse mid-nineties gay-film peers. Like its Australian cousin, it recognises the value of true love and family life (very rare elements of gay-interest films) while eschewing political and gay-community commentary (even rarer). Like its compatriot, it is a wonderful semi-musical quasi-fantasy story that’s incongruously anchored in the grittiest of inner-urban, working class settings.

Jamie (Glen Berry) is a peaceful kid who lives with his brassy mum, Sandra (Linda Henry - channeling Brenda Blethyn and Julie Walters to great effect) in a crowded and depressing housing estate. Next door on one side is Leah (Tameka Empson) who has a taste for ecstasy, alcohol and Mama Cass. On the other side is Ste (Scott Neal) a handsome school mate of Jamie who lives with his violent father and brother.

Jamie is pretty quiet, and keeps to himself, but we sense fairly early on that he has a thing for Ste, and things get moving between the two guys when Ste comes to sleep over after one particularly violent night at home. Sandra’s busy bossing her dopey boyfriend around, and trying her substantial guts out to get a promotion and move herself and Jamie into a nice flat, one where she can have nice furniture, and a rug to put her feet up on. She has a great friendship with her son, and never questions his sensitivity and weirdness, until she finds a copy of the “Gay Times” magazine under his mattress.

Writer Jonathan Harvey (adapting his hit play) said he wanted to write a story about gay people and sexuality that transcended the dictates of class. Instead of showing rough trade being fucked, fucked over, or rescued by the upper class or their own talents and gifts (perhaps the only contentious thing about Billy Elliot), Harvey wanted to create an alternative world, where romance reigned and love was more important than class or sex. In his words:

The only images I really had of gay people when I was growing up were those public school boys in cricket jumpers taking each other punting on the river, or the working-class boys who got kicked out and ended up working as rent boys. This is a play in which somebody can be working-class and still have their sexuality accepted. That was my agenda. It's not about what you get up to after lights out, its about falling in love.

He nails this idea in Beautiful Thing, creating a fabulously romantic (fantasy?) world where two young guys get to fall in love and explore themselves and each other, without risking all, or turning their private lives into public statements.

As two teenagers in love, they're in a sticky situation from the word go, and the movie doesn't present gay pride as their salvation. When the boys visit the local gay bar, they find a raucous place full of leering people who are out for a quick good time and their own satisfaction. One older patron loudly propositions Ste with a quick visit to the back room, while the performing drag queen flatters/embarrasses them by commenting on their desirability and youth over the microphone, and everyone in the bar laughs. The gay bar is no different to the shrill atmosphere Jamie and Ste tolerate at home on the housing estate, and though they enjoy the novelty of being in a new space, they aren’t ushered into a new world of hope, pride and gayness, and they don’t hurry to go back (Ste later complains that he hated the place).

Beautiful Thing is a very appropriately titled film.