This documentary, co-directed by Kim Longinotto and Scottish film-maker Franky Murray Brown, is a complex, intimate, sober look at someone making it in the music business, or maybe not making it, or maybe making it in something more important instead. It is candid about something rarely acknowledged in the life of any performer: the day-to-day, minute-by-minute dread of failure, of simply one day falling off the high-wire.
Dalton Harris is the superbly gifted young Jamaican singer who, in 2018, won TV’s The X Factor, after a struggle that included singing bizarre Nirvana covers on a cruise ship. The clip of him storming The X Factor audition with his version of Elton John’s Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word is almost worth the admission price. Dalton duly got a precarious year’s contract. But he was candid about being gay, which earned him a storm of ugly, homophobic social-media abuse in Jamaica. (The opening credits point out that Jamaica’s anti-gay laws and attitudes are a legacy of British colonial rule: true, but since 1962 Jamaica has been independent and makes its own decisions.) His mother was abusive to Dalton in his childhood and so his memories are painful.
The film shows him moving into a luxury London flat after The X Factor triumph and realising that he is going to have to keep working and being successful to justify it. The frisson of anxiety, his celebrity vertigo, is palpable. He toughly hangs on to his gay identity and artistic integrity in the face of what he sees as commercially reductive image-management, and his easy, sunny persona is sometimes replaced by something sourer, more dyspeptic and more unhappy. Dalton courageously returns to Jamaica and plays a gig where he could have been attacked; he never conceals his sexuality, but is always battling depression and substance abuse and the single he gets to record as part of his X Factor prize nosedives.
The closing credits tells us that he is now doing “regional theatre” in the UK. Does this mean panto? Either way, Dalton seems happier and healthier; he had the courage of his convictions. This is the real success.
• Dalton’s Dream is released on 2 February in UK cinemas
