Film review: Telstar

Director: Nick Moran.
With: Con O'Neill and Kevin Spacey.
Released: June 19

Nick Moran was one of the blokes in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels who wasn't Jason Statham or Vinnie Jones—and for several unspectacular years it looked as if that little career summary was the best he'd ever get. But Moran has been doing more than acting. First, he co-wrote and directed a hit play, Telstar, which dramatised the life and death of Joe Meek, a troubled British pop pioneer. Now he's turned the play into a film. And not only does it have 10 times more to say about Sixties Britpop than The Boat That Rocked, it's one of the most dynamic, bold and enjoyable directorial debuts in years.

Ignoring the standard Hollywood rock biopic template, Telstar rockets straight to the heart of its unbelievable true story. It's 1961, and Meek (Con O'Neill) is manically recording number one singles in a flat above a handbag shop in north London. The backing singers are squeezed in the loo, the band is in the living room and the landlady (Pam Ferris) is complaining about the noise, but Meek doesn't care. He's had no classical training, and he knows less about finance than he does about music theory, but he's not short of eccentric ideas, ramshackle equipment or self-confidence.

He's Meek by name, but definitely not by nature. Starting as a whirling period farce, the film crackles with some of the heartiest swearing since Peter Capaldi's in In The Loop, and it has a supporting cast of Britain's best young comic actors, including James Corden and Ralph Little as two of the musicians who put up with Meek's mad-scientist methods. Kevin Spacey is a treat, too, as his tweedy, stiff-upper-lipped business partner.

But Telstar isn't just a rip-roaring Swinging Sixties comedy. It's also a tragic character study that takes us into Meek's increasingly tortured mind. Reminiscent of the Joe Orton biopic, Prick Up Your Ears, it covers his arrest for cottaging, his reliance on rent boys and amphetamines, and the spiralling paranoia that alienates everyone around him. What's impressive is that, even as the film twists into a dark depiction of a breakdown and a suicide, it never loses the energy or invention of the earlier, lighter sequences. If there's any justice, Telstar should re-establish Meek's reputation as a visionary producer who was too far ahead of his time for his own good.

The frenetic lead performance should make O'Neill, already an Olivier Award winner for his stage work, into a big-screen star. Most importantly, the film should give Moran a future as a writer-director, leaving his appearance in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as a footnote.

Nicholas Barber