Kinky Boots (2005)
Directed by Julian Jarrold
Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer Lola and everything changes.
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What critics compared Kinky Boots to
Nevertheless, Chiwetel Ejiofor is commanding in his performance, much like Tim Curry’s famed cross-dressing singer role in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
Edgerton, whom keen-eyed audiences might recognize as Uncle Owen from the "Star Wars" prequels, is likable as the straight man (literally and comedically), though his being Conan O'Brien's doppelganger can be a bit distracting, especially when pop culture worlds collide and he has a Brad from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" moment on a Milan runway.
Eigil Bryld ("Kinky Boots," "Becoming Jane") often shoots with angles to match his subjects with Bruges's architecture and his night lighting cannily replicates the out of focus blue and gold spots of distributor Focus Features' logo.
Old folkies will recognize variations on denizens of the early-’60 coffee-house milieu, including the Clancys and Ritchie, whom Llewyn dismisses as “four micks and Grandma Moses”; the Jewish faux-cowboy Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (Adam Driver, from Girls); and singer-songwriter Tom Paxton (with Sands, now starring in Broadway’s Kinky Boots, performing Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind”).
Best known in GLBT circles for his turn as statuesque drag queen Lola in the original Kinky Boots movie, Ejiofor employs here a powerful combination of stunned resignation, abject humility, righteous indignation and graceful dignity, with more than a few nuances for good measure.
Chiwetel Ejiofor , a British actor of Nigerian background (seen in things as varied as Children of Men and Kinky Boots), plays Northup, drugged, chained, renamed, and put through a wringer of endless degradations.
In other movies, he has managed to act past ridiculousness (he originated the drag queen in the movie that became the musical Kinky Boots) or rivet you with righteousness.
The expression on Northup’s face conveys what would take reams of dialogue — capping a tour de force by Ejiofor, a British actor best known in this country for the film version of “Kinky Boots.’’
Ejiofor (“Kinky Boots”) has long been an actor on the cusp, and here he gets his breakout role.
He’s a riveting actor, chalking up stunning performances as diverse as the African immigrant selling illegal body parts out of a London hotel in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and the original Lola, the flamboyant drag queen who saves a hapless shoe factory from bankruptcy in Kinky Boots.