Alan Cumming in My Old School

MY OLD SCHOOL
Directed by Jono McLeod
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

IN 1995, Brandon Lee walked through the gates of a Glasgow secondary and settled down to complete his final year at school. He was a new boy, having spent much of his childhood travelling the world with his opera-singing mother. He had come to live in Scotland because his mother had died in a car crash, and his gran had taken him in.

He was a little odd, his peers thought – but he settled, made friends, impressed teachers.

But Brandon Lee did not exist. He wasn’t a 16-year-old school boy. Instead, he was a 32-year-old man who took it on himself to blag his way back into his former school, sit exams and earn a place at medical school.

Director Jono McLeod has pieced together the story brilliantly. From the talking heads with former classmates – each of them eloquent, funny, charming – to the use of Grange Hill-inspired cartoons to fill in the gaps, this is masterful storytelling.

What appears in the opening 30 minutes, a fairly straight forward yarn, becomes littered with dead ends and red herrings. It’s a woven narrative that grips, an intriguing consideration of the class system, a parent’s dreams for their child, the idea of social standing and value – and the human ability to reinvent yourself and create a personal fantasy to fit in with your ego’s perception of who you truly are, and who you feel you should be.

Alan Cummings plays Brandon. The person this documentary is about has agreed to be interviewed, has allowed his voice to be used – but is unwilling to be filmed. You’ll begin to understand why as this bizarre story unfolds – but it’s no bad thing anyway, as Cummings is a terrific storyteller.

There is a lingering smell beneath all this.

Brandon is clearly an eccentric person. He has contributed to the film. But when you hear him talk about his ability to control the deputy head teacher’s mind by some form of hypnosis, you begin to wonder whether we should be voyeurs.

While it is as even-handed and sensitive as possible, there is still the fear that this film could, by considering a very interesting story, be exploiting a person’­s complex mental health problems for entertainment.