It is not difficult to explain what we are dealing with here. I Swear is in the great tradition of films about courageous real-life personalities coming to terms with misunderstood disabilities.
There is now some sensitivity about able-bodied actors taking on such roles, but it is hard to imagine anyone objecting too vociferously to Robert Aramayo’s deeply empathetic turn as a pioneer in the understanding of Tourette syndrome. The English actor, best known as Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones, has plainly devoted himself to a study of the condition. It is an uncanny turn that engenders sympathy without risking mawkishness.
Kirk Jones, the film’s writer and director, has made one significant alteration to John Davidson’s life story. Raised in Galashiels, on the Scottish Borders, Davidson was the subject of three BBC documentaries, the first broadcast in his teens, and through much of the period covered he was already something of a public figure.
Excising those details allows a cleaner story that focuses on Davidson’s efforts – helped by kindly folk in the person of beloved actors – to shake off prejudice and bring together others with the condition.
The first scene reassures us that some sort of happy ending is in store. Accompanied by Dottie Achenbach (Maxine Peake), a local nurse who came to act as second mother to him, Davidson arrives at Holyrood Palace, in Edinburgh, to receive an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. He is barely in the door before he barks “F**k the queen!”
Kirk’s balanced script manages to recognise the undeniable humour in such situations without inviting the audience to laugh at Davidson. Dottie rolls her eyes. Nobody is beheaded.
The film is engaged in similar tensions. It recognises how difficult it was for those around him but doesn’t hold back in revealing unnecessary cruelties. We feel for his stressed mum (a typically sympathetic Shirley Henderson), who ultimately can’t cope. We have less sympathy for furious teachers who, as recently as the 1980s, were still allowed to enforce discipline with a leather strap.
As the film tells it, Davidson lived a largely unremarkable life until his early teens. He was a talented goalkeeper who attracted the attention of professional scouts before Tourette’s put paid to routine communication. He developed tics, involuntary swearing and a tendency to obsessive repetitions. His uncontrollable spitting eventually caused his mother to place him in front of the hearth when eating his dinner.
[ Steve review: Cillian Murphy’s performance feels well-worked but unsatisfactoryOpens in new window ]
Kirk, the director of the Micksploitation smash Waking Ned, layers on the 1980s references: Blue Monday everywhere, Benson & Hedges fags in the gold box, the 1983 “waterfall” Flake ad before the big film. This is all good fun but it also reminds us how, despite the era bristling with glamorous futurism, some social attitudes were still positively medieval.
It takes Tommy (the nearly inevitable Peter Mullan), a kindly caretaker, to help this semi-fictionalised Davidson find a route to everyday normality. Our hero blossoms as Tommy’s assistant, and eventually decides to reach out to the wider Tourette community (insofar as such a thing then existed).
You will not find any ground-breaking film-making here. Kirk is not afraid to go to some dark places – Davidson gets all hell beaten out of him – but always makes it clear there will be an eventual reward for enduring those grimmer moments.
The film feels like a therapeutic tool, with Mullan, Peake and Henderson all offering a different class of soothing balm. If my experience at the press screening is any measure – hardened critics sobbing like infants – I Swear, despite that on-the-nose title, will win friends wherever it goes. And you can count on Aramayo getting a Bafta nomination.
In cinemas from Friday, October 10th
