Bolan’s Shoes
Ian Puleston-Davies’ feature directorial debut proves more of an over-egged drama and less a tribute to Marc Bolan and glam-rock band T.Rex.
A tip of the hat: Timothy Spall and Leanne Best
The two leading players in Bolan’s Shoes, Timothy Spall and Leanne Best, are respectively 66 and 44 years-old. I only know that because I looked it up on Wikipedia, but even without that precise knowledge it is difficult to believe that the characters they play here, Jimmy and Sadie, could ever have been young kids living in a children’s home together. However, that improbability is par for the course in this unlikely drama which marks the screen debut of the actor Ian Puleston-Davies as its writer and director. The actors involved can be relied on, but the material that they are working with largely defeats them.
The Bolan of the film’s title is the glam rock singer Marc Bolan whose successful career was cut short when he tragically died in a car crash in 1977 not yet thirty years old. This film starts out by portraying a coach trip set up to take children from Liverpool to a Bolan gig in Manchester in the early seventies. The story that follows shows how tragedy struck on the return journey but then, while incorporating numerous flashbacks to this period, it jumps forward in time to portray events much later on in the adult lives of two of the children who have remained fans of Bolan and T. Rex. Indeed it is at the shrine in Barnes, the site of his death, that our two key figures meet up again years later having both gone there independently to commemorate him.
All of this might suggest that Bolan is at the heart of the movie: there is certainly a great feeling of affection for him here, recordings of his songs are heard in the course of the film and his son Rolan is an associate producer. Nevertheless, despite the early focus on Bolan and a final sequence that is similarly influenced, the fact is that the main story here is something quite distinct. What that story is should not be revealed because it offers a series of revelations which, whether related to old events or to new ones, are intended to take the viewer by surprise. They certainly do that, but whether or not the discovery that the lives of both Jimmy and Sadie have involved so much in the way of trauma, mental problems, deaths and identity issues is actually believable is the big question – or it was for me. The plays of Ibsen often pile up details of hidden histories but even he might have baulked here as one dramatic disclosure follows another to create a surfeit of them.
None of these doubts stem from the acting. Timothy Spall creates a character admirably distinct from his recent role in the television drama The Sixth Commandment and Leanne Best handles her sometimes difficult material most capably while Mark Lewis Jones and Dyfan Dwyfor reliably head the supporting cast. The one thing to be said in favour of the work of Ian Puleston-Davies is that, being an actor himself, his direction does give the impression of putting the players at ease to do good work. All the sadder, then, that the story feels so exaggerated and is given in a form which, while avoiding a melodramatic tone, fails in so many ways. This is illustrated by such scenes as that in which out of the blue the adult Jimmy is suddenly molested by an aggressive youth and his friends, by a stylised episode in which Jimmy is confronted by his childhood self and by the way in which the build-up of the plot feels decidedly overheated. It’s all as unpersuasive as the director’s decision at one point to throw in for no apparent reason a tour of Liverpool in a series of speeded-up images.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Timothy Spall, Leanne Best, Mark Lewis Jones, Dyfan Dwyfor, Matthew Horne, Holli Dempsey, Louis Emerick, Ruby Snape, Andrew Lancel, Terri Dwyer, Saffron Rose, Sion Tudor Owen.
Dir Ian Puleston-Davies, Pro Dean Fisher and Terri Dwyer, Screenplay Ian Puleston-Davies, Ph Richard Swingle, Pro Des Tina Sherifa Hicks, Ed Abi Wright, Chris Gill and Mark McKenny, Music Ian Arber, Costumes Jenny Anderton.
A Buffalo Dragon production/The Hargenant Group-Munro Film Services Ltd.
97 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 15 September 2023. Cert. 15.
