Billy Elliot is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to imagine anyone who wouldn’t like this simple rags-to-riches story enriched by wit, emotion and excellent acting. Billy Elliot is a brighter younger brother to Beautiful Thing, another excellent British film that dealt with sensitive young pups from the wrong side of the tracks who believe in love, hope and happiness. Just when you expect both films to fall into mush and corn, they don’t. Instead of rolling your eyes, you’re wiping away tears. Both films tread familiar boards in such a refreshing way, and it was especially exciting to see gay-interest films from this period that didn’t wallow in micro-politics, community issues, or kitsch.

Director Stephen Daldry, who had previously made an award-winning short film Eight, made his feature film debut here, and after this he made The Hours. Talk about a strike rate - after years as the director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, the enterprisingly creative and well-credentialed Daldry is primed for an amazing big screen career. His gift for locating the magic in the mundane is remarkable, and his exploratory approach to death, grief and sorrow is fascinating.

Also making his debut here was Jamie Bell in the title role. Bell is a trained dancer, who apparently, like Billy Elliot, had to hide his dance classes from judgemental schoolyard peers. His dancing skills are really something else, and he very adeptly stumbles around like a novice in the film’s first third as his character “discovers” dancing. Later, he dazzles with freestyle routines that have him, literally, bouncing off the walls. Billy’s missing his late mother, and trying to negotiate his relationship with his brother and father, both grizzling striking miners, who share his stubbornness and passion but whose ideas of manliness couldn’t be more different to his. Bell, thirteen years old at the time of filming, gives a fantastic performance that’s completely realistic and skips from romantic clinches with other guys, profound grief, and nail biting auditions, without missing a beat.

There’s a strong echo of Educating Rita in Billy Elliot, and that’s not necessarily due to the vowel-chomping presence of Rita herself, the marvellous Julie Walters, who’s the only veteran involved with the film. Walters - recipient of the OBE and correctly described in the film’s press kit as a “living national treasure” - is at her understated/over-the-top best. A cross between Brenda Blethyn and Glenda Jackson, Walters’ Oscar is long overdue, and she deserved Supporting Actress recognition for this - where’s that perfect big role?

Billy Elliot is a celebration of talented individuality and the rewards that can come from bravely bucking the system. But “talented” is crucial - without Billy’s gift for dancing, which takes him away from mining town life, his frustrations wouldn’t have added up to much beyond a heavy tab at the corner pub, and a mouth that turned down at the corners years too early.

Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, directors who specialise in gritty but often impossible to endure films about the struggling British working class (Leigh’s great Secrets and Lies is, of course, the watchable exception) could take a lesson or two from Daldry’s Billy Elliot. It balances grit and fizz to produce the perfect mix of tears and laughs.

Review by Mark Adnum