Mad About the Boy: the Noël Coward story swooningly told — film review

Richard Attenborough, late grandee of British cinema, is just one among the famous names to mimic Noël Coward in glossy new documentary Mad About the Boy. The impression proves a showstopper. So it should. The voice was built that way by Coward, a performer whose High English delivery was all part of the act.

Amid the archive, two contemporary players join off-camera. Rupert Everett reads from Coward’s diaries with a tamped-down, melancholy edge; Alan Cumming narrates as if worried we might walk out should he pause for breath. Each approach feels of a piece with the Coward we meet here: showman and mass of insecurity, forever both at once.

Director Barnaby Thompson is clearly a fan. He also lets his subject do the heavy lifting. The film is really just a timeline, but even the most Wiki-ish telling of the Coward story bumps into so much 20th-century history, it is hard not to get hooked. Escape and subterfuge are eternal themes.

If his upbringing in Edwardian south London wasn’t quite so poverty-scarred as that of Charlie Chaplin, money was always a headache. Like Chaplin, he duly took to the stage with a zealous work ethic and plenty of what would now be called internalised shame. But where Chaplin developed the character of the Little Tramp, Coward instead created “Noël Coward” — fabled raconteur and writer of songs, plays and films, who had in fact been a childhood stutterer without a formal education past nine. 

For all that he offers a biographer, Coward’s contradictions also pull the film in different directions. Tonally it can wobble, moving between bittersweet modern analysis of a closeted gay man (class interests Thompson less), and a simple celebration in line with a king of light comedy.

Aptly again, the cracks are smoothed over with sheer velocity. For Coward, the frantic pace of 1920s New York theatre was a life-long inspiration. “Tempo!” he cried, his personal eureka. And so the film spins through prewar triumphs, wartime double lives and postwar dives out of fashion, all at the same breakneck clip with which we see Coward sing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” on American TV, the tune now an amphetamine tongue-twister.

What does it say about Englishness that it was so defined by someone this shaped by Broadway, Vegas and tax exile in Jamaica? Well, that we must ponder alone. By the end Thompson simply calls his subject that most banal of placeholders: a national treasure — and passes out on the carpet.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from June 2