I Swear isn't the All-4-One biopic its title most immediately suggests, rather the British film industry circling back usefully to an earlier, impactful documentary. Produced and directed by Valerie Kaye and originally aired as part of the BBC's QED strand in 1989, John's Not Mad was a groundbreaking half-hour study of one John Davidson, a teenager from Galashiels who was succeeding in carving a life out despite an acute case of Tourettes that saw him cursing violently at anyone and everyone. It was poignant, but also funny enough to assume cult status - and Davidson himself was very much in on the joke, recognising the absolute howlers coming out of his mouth, usually (as per this syndrome's bizarre MO) the worst thing he could think of at the exact worst time to say it. Like Maureen Rees or Ozzy Osbourne, later megastars of what became reality television, he was above all else a great character - stricken, but sharp and self-aware - which was one reason the camera returned to him for two sequels-slash-updates: The Boy Can't Help It in 2002 and Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It in 2009. Now, by way of a third act, and after presumably many long years in development, there arrives this fictional reiteration, produced, written and directed by Kirk Jones, who made the genial Waking Ned way back when. The new film is two things simultaneously: a more robust refinement of the cosy cussing of 2023's busted awards contender Wicked Little Letters, further proof that we Brits remain the world's greatest swearers, especially when we don't mean to swear; and secondly, a supremely enjoyable rerouting of the latter-day superhero movie, centring a hero whose Tourettes is really an erratic power he must first learn to master, then use to help others.
Initially, Jones's film presents as a faintly banal coming-of-age story, no different from many others; it's only when the younger John (Scott Ellis Watson) encounters a Yeats poem at senior school that he explodes into paroxysms of facial tics and voluminous outbursts. (Poetry does that to some boys.) This being Britain in the Eighties, and then the Nineties, no-one - certainly not W.B. Yeats - has the right vocabulary for it: sweary John is dismissed as "a fucking freak" by his contemporaries and packed off by appalled teachers to receive the strap. I worried, early on, that Jones was going to use Tourettes as a generator of sniggering setpieces. Certainly, there are those here: a disastrous cinema date, frontloaded with the Kia-Ora and Flake commercials of yore; a game of blackjack that goes nowhere; later ribald bouts of courtroom effing-slash-jeffing and the worst imaginable introduction to any character played by Peter Mullan. (The framing device - assembled to reassure nervier viewers that nothing too dreadful will befall the film's subject - sees the adult John, played by Robert Aramayo, going to collect his MBE from Buckingham Palace; as those of you who've seen the trailer will already be aware, he's barely even entered the film before letting slip a strangulated shriek of "Fuck the Queen".) But Jones also quietly layers up the tragic aspects of this boy's life; you may find yourself in need of those route-one laughs to stave off gnawing despair. Davidson's father quits the family home; his mum (Shirley Henderson) withdraws into seclusion; there is a suicide attempt. Davidson's TV appearances made him a public figure, arguably a star, but even some way into adulthood, Tourettes rendered him a lonely boy, banished from polite society as his parents once sent him from the family dining table, and scared that his sudden lashings-out would drive potential new friends away. The life gets fleshed out; it's not merely cheap laughs.
Half of that job was, you'd say, done at the casting stage. As the younger and older Davidsons, Watson and Aramayo not only look the part - slipping effortlessly into John's shellsuits - but nail the violence of these convulsions: those of a young man attempting to pull himself together, fix the chemistry in his head, and bite down hard on the rudest of words. Jones surrounds these newcomers with safe hands who've realised this is a chance to talk (and laugh) about an underdiscussed condition. Henderson, dressed like a Scottish Widow, deftly sketches a small, guarded, hard life; Maxine Peake, as the mental health nurse who prescribes understanding and acceptance, gets to be cheerier and more expansive; and Mullan, as the caretaker who offers John work, talks Aramayo through a job interview that's at once hilarious and heart-in-throat terrifying. Something of these players' earlier work in social realism endures - and often pokes through - I Swear's jollier Britflick toplayer; you come away sensing this would be a tough existence even if your brain weren't going haywire. There's an obvious concession to the mainstream in the film's sporadic bouts of Britpop nostalgia, and I suspect one reason we're getting this story now is that John Davidson somehow transcends political correctness, as a man who bears no responsibility whatsoever for the terrible things he says. Yet the movie remains lived-in rather than calculated or sugarcoated, and its own chemistry is sound; it's a rare comedy-drama that balances the funny with the heartbreaking, the painful with the inspirational. Is it too eccentric to floor the awards circuit the way, say, Scott Hicks' Shine did thirty years ago? (I wonder if it isn't closer to Lee Daniels' Precious: a very special case.) Either way, the possibility of the real John Davidson cursing at Ryan Seacrest on the Oscars red carpet is a tantalising one - and in the coming months, we'll see far less compelling contenders for the title of this year's wee film that could.
I Swear is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
