Get Real

Steven Carter is sixteen, lives in Basingstoke, and the only person who knows he is gay is his neighbour Linda. Then a relationship starts, unexpectedly, with John Dixon, the school's athletics star and everyone's favourite. John wants it kept quiet. Steven decides, in a piece for the school magazine, that he is finished hiding. Simon Shore directs. Ben Silverstone plays Steven, Brad Gorton plays John, Charlotte Brittain plays Linda. The source is Patrick Wilde's play What's Wrong with Angry?, and Wilde wrote the screenplay too. The play's title is angrier than the film's, and that is not incidental: it was written when the legal age of consent in Britain was still different for gay relationships. The best thing in it is Linda. In stories like this the friend is usually a function. Here she has her own life, her own loneliness, and hard things to say to Steven. It was a small production on the scale of British independent film, and it has become one of the most cited adolescence films of that generation. Who it is for: viewers who like nineties British independent cinema and stories of identity at school age. Who it is not for: it edges towards television drama in places. If you want a formal idea, it is not here.