Glasgow Film Festival reviews: My Old School | The Outfit

Starring Alan Cumming as Brandon Lee, a seemingly gifted Canadian “teenager" who perpetrated a bizarre hoax on the pupils and teachers of Bearsden Academy in the 1990s, My Old School is oddly heartwarming, writes Alistair Harkness

Alan Cumming in My Old School

Always destined to be the first big highlight of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, Jono McLeod’s stranger-than-fiction documentary My Old School (****) didn’t disappoint at its European (and hometown) premiere. Recounting the notorious story of Brandon Lee, a seemingly gifted Canadian “teenager" who perpetrated a bizarre hoax on the pupils and teachers of Bearsden Academy when he enrolled as a student in 1993 (you probably remember the main twist, but the film works best the less you know going in), it’s an incredible tale – funny, sad, creepy and, at times, oddly heartwarming.

McLeod was one of Lee’s classmates and he assembles his fellow students (a nice bunch) to relive the details while Alan Cumming stands in for Brandon, who didn’t want his face on camera, but did agree to be interviewed. Hearing Lee’s lip-synched testimony is a smart distancing device that adds to the mystery (there’s a good use of 1990s-style animation too). But McLeod’s own closeness to the story gives it an easy-going intimacy that aids his ability to tease out all the twists and turns.

The festival’s opening night movie, The Outfit (**), was full of twists and turns too, but this 1950s-set chamber piece about a Saville Row-trained “cutter” (Mark Rylance) who makes suits for Chicago mobsters in his adoptive home is like a play masquerading as a movie.

Co-written and directed by Graham Moore (who won an Oscar for his screenplay to the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game), it’s overburdened with metaphorical soliloquies and neatly engineered reversals and reveals, but none of it feels particularly alive on screen. Rylance is fine, but his famed stillness becomes a little wearying and the rest of the cast look like grown-ups in a Bugsy Malone revival.

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