I Swear review - taking stock of Tourette's

People sometimes go to the movies for the violence and maybe even for the sex. Until recently they didn’t particularly buy a ticket for the bad language, but lately, British cinema has been making this a selling point.

Where Wicked Little Letters tried to elicit a tee-hee response to a rather boring chain of expletives fruitlessly spread about, I Swear – packaged similarly as a gentle Brit-com – is a more pointed and affecting piece, written and directed by Kirk Jones, who made his name with Waking Ned in 1998 and is a quiet master of deft and mordant social commentary.

Tourette’s is associated with involuntary swearing though most of those who have it don’t swear: they’re plagued by muscle spasms that fill the face or lead to broken crockery as limbs flail. But Davidson (now in his fifties) has the full range of issues, tracked here from his adolescence in a working-class home in the Scottish borders. For the first half-hour, Scott Ellis Watson is really excellent as the young John, faced with uncomprehending parents as his tics and cuss-words start to outcrop.

“What’s all this nonsense? Don’t play the fool at the dinner table,” instructs his mum (Shirley Henderson), adding: “Have a hot bath and an early night.” School work, hopes of a soccer apprenticeship and job prospects are scuppered as he blurts out the c-word into the face of the headmaster.

By the time we join the unemployed John in his mid-twenties (Robert Aramayo), the tics and verbal eructation have become even more explosive and Jones amps up the comedy of a world scandalised by John’s radioactive yelps. Going to nightclubs and even libraries is a no-no. He yells “Pigs!” and “I’m selling drugs!” at the police, and “I’ve got a bomb!” on a train. In a court appearance, swearing the oath is something he’s good at for all the wrong reasons.

The job of “disability dramas” is generally to undermine the very notion of disability – that difference and even “neurodiversity” might be common to all. That comes through strongly here: character trumps everything, and the movie John is one of the nicest blokes you could meet. (Davidson is also an executive producer of the film.) The glancing misogyny he spouts is given a pass, and although someone mentions that he can also come out with hate speech, we don’t really hear any of this. Yet the film, despite its gentle, pendulous swing, doesn’t over-romanticise a condition that remains a painful illness and can lead, as here, to suicide attempts.

Modern thinking is to cast differently-abled actors in differently-abled parts (Daniel Day-Lewis might not play Christy Brown in My Left Foot these days), but that was not a probable option here, given the rarity of Tourette’s. Still, one or two actors from that community appear in small parts – notably Andrea Bisset as a young woman John meets as he leans into a role as a Tourette’s ambassador.

Robert Aramayo (known for playing Elrond in the Lord of the Rings streaming show) gives an all-in, awards-worthy performance in the main role. Henderson pulls off the tricky task of playing angry and sad at the same time as John’s pinched mother. Maxine Peake is less challenged as a super-kind woman who takes him in and realises he needs more than a medical fix, while Peter Mullan has jocund good timing as a caretaker at a community centre who gives him a job.

Being British, the film devotes quite a lot of time to people’s living arrangements, middle-aged folks’ medical conditions and the labours of making tea. An over-long final section resembles an extended ad for a charity at times, and a television documentary at others. In fact, the film’s biggest departure from reality is omitting John Davidson’s early national fame: he was featured in several BBC documentaries from the age of 16 (including John’s Not Mad, 1989). The movie starts and ends with John accepting an MBE in 2019, when – in this version, at least – he yells out within earshot of the monarch, “Fuck the Queen!”

It’s notable that his swearing isn’t entirely random or detached from the Freudian underneath. I Swear has something in common with the Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lying (2009), where everyone feels compelled to tell the absolute truth the whole time. In surely one of the best going-to-the-pictures scenes ever done, Young John takes a girl on a date (with her mother) to watch Tootsie and the notorious, fellatio-themed ad for Cadbury’s Flake comes up during the Pearl and Deans. “Suck my dick!” yells John, promptly ending the evening out. We might all have shadow selves, constructive and destructive, and this movie reminds us that we can be more than one person at any one time.