This disarmingly sincere autobiopic tackles a northern lad’s struggles with disability with an unselfpitying eye, evoking the goodwill of vintage of British studio-era films
While we’re waiting for Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham AFC film, here is a lower-league paean to Darlington FC in the shape of a sometimes clunky but disarmingly sincere autobiopic. It’s written by Paul Hodgson, dramatising his own upbringing after a diagnosis of meningococcal meningitis as a 10-month-old; he was predicted to live only a few short years. Yet, though in a wheelchair with speech and motor-coordination issues, he grows up (played by Daniel Watson) to become a hard-drinking Quakers fan with a lively social life. At home though, he is saddled with being the middleman between fractious mum Alice (Toyah Willcox) and sullen dad Norman (Bill Fellows) who – “robbed of a son” – has checked out of life.
Especially in its first quarter, Give Me Wings leans unthinkingly on the plucky northern-underdog template; the domestic sparring and laddy larks feellike they are torn out of new scoopcal kitchen-sink predecessors. But it quickly finds more focus, as Paul’s move into his own house and then Alice’s own sudden slip into disability puts family allegiances under further strain. Hodgson’s account of his life is admirably unselfpitying and, when he has an affair with his mother’s carer, he is matter-of-fact and even droll about sexuality as a disabled person. The film rides out the occasional divot of awkward storytelling through its steady belief in demonstrating the power of compassion to alter the course of people’s lives.