thePeanutBloggery

If you’re like me, you’re preparing for the Golden Globe Awards (airing Monday on NBC) by watching as many of the nominated movies as possible. You could put on some shoes and go out in public to see The Pursuit of Happyness or Dreamgirls, or you could spend Friday night in and watch Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nominated performance (“Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy”) in Kinky Boots, a sweet film about honoring the past by moving forward.

Do you remember the moment you realized alternative music had become pop? The same thing appears to be happening to those small comedies from the UK. They used to make us feel adventurous and cultured; now they’re safe and familiar. Following the template of The Full Monty and Waking Ned Divine, Kinky Boots is the story of a likeable young man, Charlie (Joel Edgerton), who inherits his family’s failing shoe factory in small, working-class Northampton. One night in London, he meets Lola, a drag queen, and devises an outrageous plan to save the factory by making stiletto boots for men.

Best known for his role as the bad guy in Serenity, Ejiofor portrays an utterly unthreatening and sexless drag queen, a standard set by Nathan Lane and Philip Seymour Hoffman. What makes this performance unique, however, is the inevitable moment when the wig and the dress come off. In Flawless, The Birdcage, and even The Crying Game this moment is one of humiliation and pathos. Here it’s brave and prideful.

Although Kinky Boots has music in it, it isn’t a musical…yet. If its predecessors are any indication of its future, like The Full Monty and Billy Elliot, this movie is destined to be a Broadway musical in ten years, so see it now, before they cast Usher as Lola.

Kinky Boots is available on Movies On Demand.