For much of his life, the Scottish activist John Davidson has been raising awareness about Tourette’s syndrome, the neurodevelopmental disorder he lives with. While some people’s lives and horizons shrink as they age, Davidson’s only seems to have inspiringly expanded. Born in 1971, he has spent decades educating people about Tourette’s in talks, workshops, interviews, documentaries and a best-selling 2025 memoir, “I Swear.” Davidson has been so well known for so long, at least in Britain, that he has reached one of the more dubious milestones of celebrity: He is now the subject of an aggressively bland, cliché-ridden biopic.
That movie, also titled “I Swear,” is opening in the wake of a noxious debacle. On Feb. 22, when the Black American actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage at the BAFTA movie awards in London, Davidson — who was in the audience — involuntarily shouted a racist slur. Before the ceremony, guests had been told of his condition and that they might “hear some involuntary noises or movements.” It was a ludicrously vague warning, an unforced error that the BBC made worse by leaving in the slur when the show aired. Davidson said he was mortified, and the BBC apologized; the whole thing was a dispiriting mess.
The movie is dispiriting for other reasons. It’s also a missed opportunity simply because the real Davidson is one of those ordinary yet extraordinary figures who draw you to them with their heart and grit, with the force of their personality and the epic complexities of their lives. What’s equally exasperating is that the two actors who play him — Scott Ellis Watson wins you over as the young John while Robert Aramayo seals the deal as the older, more melancholic version — are so much better than the rest of the movie. Each persuasively simulates the verbal and motor tics that characterize Davidson’s type of Tourette’s, and they do so with such emotional lucidity that you see the person, not just the disorder.
Written and directed by Kirk Jones, the circularly structured story opens on a note of triumph in 2019, then cuts back decades to shortly before Davidson was diagnosed, before it begins marching forward in time. In short order, Watson’s young John helps set the scene and shifting reality. One minute, John is nestled in the cozy chaos of his ordinary family life — a badly served Shirley Henderson plays his pinched mother, Steven Cree his soon-absent father — and the next, he seems possessed by baffling sounds and gestures, by wild blinks, chin-juts and profane outbursts. His symptoms grow more pronounced, disruptive, even violent, sending him and his family into a crisis that doesn’t abate, even after the diagnosis.
One of the welcome surprises of Davidson’s memoir, an as-told-to account written by Abbie Ross, is how matter-of-factly it chronicles his life, the hurdles that he cleared and the ones he didn’t. It also relates how, with help from some friends and acquaintances — most notably a mate’s gentle, protective mother, Dottie Achenbach — Davidson found a community and a place in the larger world. Written in the first person, the memoir is clear and direct, and by turns plaintive, painful and surprisingly funny. It’s also nuanced. Davidson is forthright about his ordeals and anguish, and how his tics (he has a particularly severe form of Tourette’s) unmoored him internally and cut him off from other people. It’s tough, empathetic, human.
The movie more or less follows the same narrative arc as Davidson’s memoir but smooths his life and its burrs into packaged uplift. John struggles at home and at school, repeat. He’s mocked, brutalized and beaten. He endures and perseveres, and in time he’s taken under wing by the family of one-dimensional smilers headed up by Dottie (Maxine Peake). He also gets a job at a community center, where he meets Tommy (Peter Mullan), a gruff manager turned mentor. There are some nice moments and cute dogs amid the clichés, but because Jones overplays every beat and hard sells each emotion, there’s no room for you to discover anything. The only glimmers of real life come from Watson and especially from Aramayo.
It’s no surprise that Jones, in compressing decades of a life into two screen hours, has taken liberties. The problem is that he hasn’t just glossed over some of the more agonizing moments that Davidson deals with head-on (including how his condition affects his intimate life); Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies. What you don’t see here is the John who, in the late 1980s, when Davidson was 16, readily agreed to be the subject of a widely seen BBC documentary, “John’s Not Mad.” He faced the world with courage and raw openness, something that he has continued to do even when others fail him.
I Swear Rated R for language and mild violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘I Swear’ Review: Surviving and Thriving Against the Odds appeared first on New York Times.
