Tucked

Almost six decades after sneeringly blackmailing Dirk Bogarde's gay lawyer in Basil Dearden's ground-breaking Victim (1961), 83-year-old Derren Nesbitt gives a career-capping performance as veteran drag queen Jackie in Jamie Patterson's poignant study of acceptance and reconciliation. Set in the director's home town and reuniting him with his star after Home for Christmas (2014), the story of Nesbitt's age-gap friendship with aspiring artiste Faith (Jordan Stephens) captures the seedy glamour of the Brighton drag scene with affectionate exuberance. But, while the stage sequences combine cornball wit and kitschy panache, the narrative drifts towards sentimental melodrama after Jackie decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter after discovering he has terminal cancer. A cemetery sequence is particularly maudlin, while there's a frustrating imbalance in the focus on the straight Jackie's domestic travails and the non-binary Faith's bid to find a niche. But Steve Oram cameos amusingly as a gender-insensitve drug dealer, while the byplay between the leads is as crisp as Paul O'Callaghan's photography.