Blue Jean is a strikingly confident feature. With her debut, writer-director Georgia Oakley has made a film that knows exactly what it intends to explore and goes about it by wielding mood, an especially tricky tool in the filmmaker’s kit, with total precision. The movie examines internalized homophobia through its protagonist, taking her on a journey of recognizing and grappling with her troubled relationship with her own identity. But Blue Jean is just as interested in the sociopolitical atmosphere that distorts self-denial into appearing logical – and the power of community to, if not heal those wounds, give people hope that healing is possible. Give yourself over to its wavelength, and I believe you’ll find it engrossing, insightful, and, unfortunately, quite timely.
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Jean (Rosy McEwen), a PE teacher and semi-closeted lesbian, wants nothing more than to live an apolitical life. She is happy and successful in her work, in a committed relationship with Viv (Kerrie Hayes), and content to relax in front of the TV most nights. But in 1988 Newcastle, UK, that desire is a challenge to achieve. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives are in power, and debating a series of laws that would prohibit the promotion of homosexuality by local governments and public institutions, known collectively as Section 28. Viv and their other lesbian friends, who more openly embrace gay subculture, argue that their very existence is politicized — Jean won’t be able to stay uninvolved forever. When the arrival of Lois (Lucy Halliday), a new student, threatens her carefully segmented life, Jean is forced to decide how far she’ll go to maintain her status quo, and consider whether she should want to in the first place.

Lucy Halliday in Blue Jean

As a character, Jean is fully fledged individual, and exploring the film’s themes in this ’80s Britain milieu without diluting her to a representational stand-in requires walking a careful line. Oakley’s solution is keep the scope limited to her protagonist’s experience, and flesh out the sinister influence of mainstream society’s hostility to her through an accumulation of moments. They start small and relatively innocuous: a firmly heteronormative dating show; a political radio broadcast. Jean has the power to tune these out if she so chooses. But they grow more intrusive as the rhetoric both for and against Section 28 becomes more forceful, and soon she can’t avoid overhearing her colleagues’ casually homophobic stances on it. Her political reality bleeds through, eventually exposing to us how it has shaped her behavior all along.

Blue Jean’s strength is its single-mindedness, and everything acts in unison to further our understanding of how Jean’s inner struggle relates to her environment. Each interaction with people in her life, from Viv and Lois to her sister and young nephew, adds a new layer to her. The film’s cinematography and use of color do the same, and are key reasons why the social atmosphere has a sense of emotional weight. The title, Blue Jean, could lend itself to multiple readings, but it also tips us off to Oakley’s associating the color blue with queerness. Colors at Jean’s school are all washed out, and as her identity crisis deepens, she is often framed in her white uniform against a white wall. Only, her eyes are always the most striking blue; Jean’s true self peeks out at the world, no matter how desperately she tries to hide it.

Kerrie Hayes and Rosy McEwen in Blue Jean

The contrast to this setting is the bar Jean and her friends frequent, where they are all totally free to be themselves. It’s a darker space filled with more vibrant color, and it’s sometimes shot in a way that feels expansive. Despite being an enclosed, secluded room, its patrons do not feel confined in it, so Blue Jean ensures that neither do we; it’s no coincidence that a moment of conflict partway through the film, when Jean first starts to feel the walls closing in, takes place in the bathroom stall. The impact of this counterbalance to the rest of Jean’s world is crucial to Oakley’s thematic aims. Without this healthy example of what self-acceptance looks like, the nuances of how Jean reinforces her own discrimination might not be quite as clear.

Then again, so much of that work is done in McEwan’s performance that they would always remain legible. She plays Jean as a compelling mixture of naivety and self-awareness, as capable of believing her approach to life will bring her happiness as of recognizing each time she’s caused herself (or others) damage. It’s like we can see her having an out-of-body experience each time she acts against her own self-interest because she has cannot let go of the notion that it’s the “right” way to behave. There is delicate work being done across the cast, especially Hayes, Halliday, and Lydia Page as popular schoolgirl Siobhan, but McEwan’s heartbreak carries Blue Jean, as it needs to. She and Oakley are ones to keep an eye on, but for now, this film of theirs is well worth your full attention.

Blue Jean is now playing in theaters. The film is 97 minutes long and is not currently rated.