Going nowhere | 3 March 2012

The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 — the summer I turned 16, as it happens — so I expected at least some of it to resonate, but its characters are so unfinished and improbabilities so plentiful and narrative so unoriginal it’s like an extended episode of Fame, only worse. I do feel rotten about saying this, yes, as it’s obviously been made with affection, and its heart is in the right place, but as I tell myself whenever I kick a puppy or drown a kitten, ‘If it needs doing it needs doing, and it’s not so bad when you get down to it.’ Seriously, it isn’t, and once you’ve done it the first time, it’s a breeze there on in.

Directed by Marc Evans, with a script by Laurence Coriat, it stars Minnie Driver as Vivienne May, one of those inspirational, Bohemian, free-spirited teachers who only ever exist in films, probably because they’d be eaten alive in the classroom. But, then, everyone at this school is a cliché, including the PE teacher, who is brutish and sadistic, an older female teacher, who is prissily conservative, a French teaching assistant obsessed by sex, ooh la la, and so on. (I can’t be bothered to list them all; I’ve got a life.)

Anyway, Miss May, who is fond of kaftans and her tambourine — yes, eaten alive, before first break probably — decides that what her final-year pupils most require is to put on a rock opera version of The Tempest, with musical numbers culled from David Bowie, Nick Drake, The Byrds.