Dancer

Director Steven Cantor and subject Sergei Polunin seem uncertain which story to tell in this moving, but unfocused profile of a self-styled ballet bad boy. A promising child gymnast, Polunin left the run-down Ukrainian town of Kherson to become a dance prodigy in Kyiv and London. At the age of 19, he became the youngest-ever principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. But the guilt of seeing parents Vladimir and Galina divorce after taking jobs across the continent to support his ambition drove Polunin off the rails and he quit after two years of drink, drugs and tattoos. Cantor clearly sees Polunin as a symbol of Eastern Europe's failure to exploit the freedoms and opportunities presented by the collapse of Communism. He is also keen to explore the psychological strain that success imposes upon the famous. But the swaggering Polunin is more concerned with self-promotion, and too much of the film's later stages are occupied by the David LaChapelle video to Hozier's Take Me to Church that went viral and dissuaded Polunin from falling out of love with dance. Slickly made, but too arch to be genuinely revealing.