★★★★

Already the subject of three landmark  documentaries – not least the BBC’s seminal 1989 short John’s Not Mad – the remarkable and often gut wrenching story of John Davidson finds dramatisation this week in Kirk Jones’ I Swear. All emotion lives here. The tears, both joy and despair, are constant. Sure enough, this is a film that grabs you by the heart with astonishing ease and offers little let up. A deeply human script from Jones himself is triumph enough but it’s the powerhouse performances before the camera that nail the landing.

Davidson’s role in the advancement of public awareness toward Tourette syndrome would eventually lead to his being awarded an MBE in 2019, courtesy of the late Queen Elizabeth II. It’s here that the film opens, mining an unhealthy mix of hilarity and agonising horror for a laugh and a gasp as Davidson cannot help but release a flush of treason. Immediately, Jones rewinds us some four decades to a 1983 unaware of all that will come. A familiar launchpad to a narrative that finds nuance and individuality at pace, the film evolving into less familiar and more rewarding territory than commonly found in the average biopic.

Scott Ellis Watson plays the young John, a painfully promising teen, growing up in the Scottish border town of Galashiels. He’s sporty, good looking, smart and not unlucky with the ladies. There’s talk of a football scholarship – John’s a whizz in goal – and the fast mover even manages to win a date on his very first day at secondary. The ticks start with relative subtly, head jerks mainly, but snowball all too quickly. Nowadays? Who knows. In 1983, Tourette’s is game over for young John. At home, he’s chastised by his mum (Shirley Henderson) for ‘acting the fool at the dinner table’ and prescribed ‘a hot bath and an early night’. At school, it’s a belt on the hand and accusations of attention seeking. And that’s just the teachers.

Neat transition shifts young, hopeful Watson into Robert Aramayo’s more world beaten, late twenties John, still living with mum and dosed high on perfunctory but psychologically bruising antipsychotics. A warmer film grows from the introduction of Maxine Peake’s Dotty – by name and nature – into John’s life. A mental health nurse by trade, and mother to an old school friend do John’s, Dotty oozes compassion, affording John to rediscover the joy in his life. Jones takes care never to laugh at John but is smart enough to allow the funnier side to his outbursts to be communally shared. Spunk for milk and all.

On point casting is the real coup here. Peake and Henderson make for a terrific binary pairing, each a complexly sympathetic side of the same coin, ably supporting Aramayo’s flash in the pan central turn. No scene resonates so much in I Swear as that in which Aramayo joins a fellow young sufferer in the back of a car, empowering her to release every ounce of the verbal tickery she’s been struggling to contain. Her parents stand awkwardly on side as the pair let rip. It’s immensely satisfying, gloriously rude and genuinely moving, as so much of the film proves to be. Comic inflections notwithstanding, Jones holds no punches in depicting the abuses of John’s life. 

Into his final swathe, Jones leans closer into the stylings of the documentaries that have inspired the film. An inclusive Tourette’s day – ‘we are the majority!’ – casts real life youngsters living with the condition and embraces the chaos. Hope springs, meanwhile, as one final jump into the future explores the medical advancement that is today revolutionising the experience of those still being diagnosed. It’s extraordinary but far from the end of the story.

T.S.