Characters Make ‘Like It Is’ a Compelling Love vs. Career Tale

In Paul Oremland’s engaging and reflective first film, “Like It Is,” Steve Bell’s young, boyish-looking Craig doesn’t look like a bare-knuckles fighter, but then it wouldn’t occur to you that he might be gay either. He’s actually a wiry, focused battler of much ferocity, fueled by the rage and frustration he feels over the sexual orientation he can neither deny nor accept.

Living in the garish old English beach resort of Blackpool with an older brother in whom he’s afraid to confide, Craig gets by with the money he makes from these illegal bouts. After a particularly bloody match, he goes to a disco to cool off and meets Matt (Ian Rose), a London music promoter who has come to Blackpool with his roommate, a well-known pop singer, Paula (Dana Behr), who’s performing at the club that night.

In contrast to the conflicted, inarticulate and closeted Craig, Matt is a poised, upwardly mobile openly gay man. Matt’s affability, assurance and pleasant fair looks make it possible for Craig to acknowledge their mutual attraction, yet when he takes Matt home and into his bed he can’t deal with the situation. Matt proves to be understanding and drops off his business card on the way out.

Back in London, Matt is busy supporting Paula’s career and working hard for his witty, bitchy boss Kelvin (Roger Daltrey), for whom he hopes to land the opportunity of managing a club. Without any warning, Craig turns up on Matt’s doorstep, having come to terms with his sexuality and eager to experience the liberating impact of London’s Soho district, where gays live as openly as in West Hollywood. What Craig and Matt didn’t anticipate is that they would start falling in love.

At heart, Oremland’s film, well-written by Robert Cray, is a highly contemporary love vs. career story, given a gay twist. Interestingly, it’s not a sometimes hostile and unjust society that endangers Craig and Matt’s budding romance but their involvement with Paula and Kelvin. Emotionally as well as professionally dependent upon Matt, the selfish Paula resents Craig’s presence from the get-go and makes few bones about it.

Kelvin is another, far more complicated matter. He sees himself as a mentor to Matt and wants him to put work unequivocally first. Kelvin is a rich middle-aged gay guy who goes after any man he wants but has grown cynical about love. Could it be that Paula and Kelvin are jealous of Matt; perhaps both feel more love for Matt than they’re willing to admit? The strength of “Like It Is” is that it resists spelling everything out and suggests that Paula and Kelvin, so quick to put down Craig simply for being from the north of England, are out of touch with themselves. In any event, both threaten to wreck Craig and Matt’s relationship before it barely has a chance to flower.

This willingness and ability to see characters in such considerable complexity allows Oremland to provide his actors with multifaceted, three-dimensional roles in which they excel. Bell, who in fact won the Amateur Boxing Assn.’s U.K. featherweight title last year, is an impressively natural actor in his film debut, and “Like It Is” is primarily Craig’s story. Rose’s Matt, however, is the film’s versatile linchpin, interacting credibly with an increasingly tangled and edgy predicament with Craig, Paula and Kelvin.

Still looking great, Daltrey, legendary lead singer of the Who, threatens to walk away with the film as the campy, forceful Kelvin, whom we meet getting a collagen shot from his plastic surgeon. Kelvin is still in his physical prime but as a gay man he’s already seeing himself as old in the youth-oriented society and industry in which he flourishes.

Behr, a British pop star, reveals the vulnerability in the nasty Paula. Far more credible than “Beautiful Thing,” the most recent British gay film to create a stir, “Like It Is” tries hard to tell it--like it really is.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film contains a fairly explicit sex scene and scenes of drug-taking.

‘Like It Is’

Steve Bell: Craig

Ian Rose: Matt

Roger Daltrey: Kelvin

Dana Behr: Paula

A First Run Features release of a Deep in You Ltd./Fulcrum/Channel 4 co-production. Director Paul Oremland. Producer Tracey Gardiner. Executive producer Christopher Hird. Screenplay by Robert Cray, from a story by Cray, Oremland and Kevin Sampson. Cinematographer Alistair Cameron. Editor Jan Langford. Music Don McGlashan. Costumes Sarah Bowern. Production designer Tim Sykes. Art director Louise Bedford. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

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