‘Kinky Boots’ Finds Joy Where Some Think It Doesn’t Belong

“Ladies, gentlemen, and those who are yet to make up their minds,” if you’re looking for a fabulous story of struggle, understanding, and unlikely love this summer, look no further than the 2005 film Kinky Boots, currently available for streaming on Hulu. It may have found bigger life as a mega-hit Broadway musical, but the original film more than carries its weight — just like the titular footwear.

The opening shot of the film is a pair of brilliant red shoes contrasted against the dreary backdrop of a boardwalk in one of Britain’s northern provincial towns. A sad-looking young boy melts into sheer bliss as he begins dancing in them, before being dragged away by his ashamed father. It’s a simple scene, but it sets the tone for a beautiful story of finding one’s own joy where others don’t think it belongs.

Flashing forward, we meet Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton), the prodigal son of a Northampton shoe factory owner, as he and his fiancee seek to escape the drudgery of the industrial Midlands for a new and better life in London. Of course, no sooner have they unpacked their bags in the big city than we find out that the elder Mr. Price has died unexpectedly, leaving his optimistically-named Price & Sons factory — and the dozens of workers it employs — in peril of disappearing into the past, and into the hands of developers who’d love to convert their century-old workplace into luxury condos.

Charlie’s reluctant to get back involved in the family business, but faced with a workforce in need of a leader — “the Price Factory has to have a Mister Price, Mister Price,” one of his father’s loyal assistants declares — he can’t drag himself away. When he realizes that his father’s largest customer had cancelled their wholesale order in favor of cheap Slovakian imports, leaving the factory with stacks of unsellable and unfashionable men’s brogues, he sees no hope.

Drunk and despondent leaving a London pub, he sees a woman being pursued down an alleyway by would-be attackers and intervenes, only to be knocked cold. When he comes to, he’s in her dressing room — and she’s Lola (Chiwetel Ojiafor), a drag queen preparing to perform the lead in her club’s nightly show. She thanks Charlie for his well-meaning, if ultimately inconsequential intervention, while lamenting the lack of durability in her women’s stage boots. “Like so many things, they can’t handle the weight of a man.”

This proves pivotal when, in the midst of regretfully conducting layoffs, Charlie’s upbraided by Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts), one of his employees, for his and his father’s negligence in allowing their business to fall into obsolescence and failure to identify a “niche market”. He puts two and two together, and sets out to design “proper, decent, built-to-last boots for women… who are men.” He can’t do this without a true working partnership with Lola, who lambasts his first dowdy burgundy prototype. “Burgundy is the color of a hot water bottle,” she fires at him. “Red! Red is the color of sex, and fear, and danger, and signs that say ‘do not enter’! All my favorite things in life! Two and a half feet of tubular sex!”

As they set out on the dual challenge of designing a boot sexy enough for the stage and engineered strongly enough to support its performer, they’re faced with resistance from the factory workers, including the close-minded Don (Nick Frost), as well as from Charlie’s fiancee Nicola, who wants him to abandon the factory and move on with his life. Charlie’s faced with the challenge of changing hearts and minds, including his own.

Edgerton plays his Charlie with a befuddled charm — he doesn’t fully understand Lola, but he’s trying, and the film’s treatment of gender issues doesn’t feel terribly dated despite the societal progress that’s been made in the 14 years since its release. Potts’ Lauren provides a welcome shot of warmth and conscience, leading Charlie to better decisions. The emotional center of the film, though, is Lola. Ojiafor plays her with both brash swagger and wounded sensitivity, and the deep pathos of someone who’s been fighting her whole life, and won’t stand for mistreatment. “I can tell from years of experience when I’m being smuggled in through a rear door,” she reminds Charlie on her first visit to the Price factory. Her father wanted a son who was a boxer, she explains, and he never accepted her for who she was, not even on his deathbed.

The film culminates in a fantastically cathartic and enjoyable musical number — though it’s not a full movie musical, it’s easy to see how and why it was adapted for Broadway. While some movies make it to the Great White Way as paint-by-numbers sing-along retellings of stories that didn’t really call for it (I’m looking at you, Ghost: The Musical), Kinky Boots feels like a film that was screaming for the full musical treatment.

Even without it, though, it’s a fully-realized story that deserves to be revisited on its own. As Lola reminds Charlie, while perusing a back storeroom, “one never knows what joy one might find among the unwanted and abandoned.”

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Where to stream Kinky Boots