When making a film about a larger-than-life public figure, it’s always a good idea to cast an unknown, otherwise you get too many egos for one character to take. The makers of Worried About The Boy wisely did just that and 17-year-old debutante Douglas Booth is a revelation as gay, ’80s popstar Boy George.

The life of George O’Dowd (as he was born) is an ongoing, real-life soap opera (most recently getting four months in prison for assaulting a rent boy) and the writer of Worried About The Boy has cleverly focused on two short, specific periods in Boy George’s life: his swift rise to fame from the underground club scene in early ’80s London and an even swifter fall from grace after his heroine addiction became public knowledge in 1986.

The film shifts between the two periods, although focuses mainly on his early years; the scenes in 1986 used to underline how fame has affected his fragile state of mind. It’s an approach that works very well because most people have no knowledge of George before his chart assault as lead singer of Culture Club – everything after is fairly public knowledge – and we get a glimpse of the man behind the legend. It also serves to give the filmmakers some artistic license – are we really to believe that George ambushed Malcolm Mclaren in a barbershop and performed ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ for him as an audition?

The fashionable, early ’80s setting was always going to make this an exercise in cool and the movie has a hip soundtrack that sounds a lot like the current crop of recycled pop music. The movie self-consciously uses a lot of stylised titles, scene transitions and famous lookalikes, but it seems to forget about this half-way through.

When you get down to the bones of the story, there’s not really a lot of meat there. Much screen time is spent demonstrating how Boy George was a ‘girly’ boy that appealed to a lot of handsome, hetero men. Writer Tony Basgallop tries to hammer home the point that these ‘straight’ men really only had sex with George because he was more-or-less a girl and not just ambiguous and androgynous – in fact at one point George’s first serious boyfriend insists George call himself a “girl” so they can progress to the bedroom.

George’s eventual rejection by Kirk (who was lead singer in new wave group, Theatre of Hate, at the time) and the death of a close friend from an overdose is the catalyst that sets George on his way to forming Culture Club and into the life of drummer John Moss, another formerly straight guy who would become the love of George’s life.

Mathew Horne as Moss gives a convincing performance and you feel the genuine affection he still has for George even when things become pretty psychotic between them.

But this is really the story of a son seeking something indefinable and a father trying to bridge the generation gap and understand his child’s life choices. The scenes between Douglas Booth and Francis Magee as George’s father are very touching.

Marc Warren is also good as George’s initial boss and then fellow popstar, Steve Strange, but the whole thing is given soul by Booth’s exceptional performance, at turns pathetic, sardonic and fabulous; he even sounds like George. In fact, watching him at the end of the film, fully made up as the iconic Boy George we remember and bouncing around the Top of the Pops stage to Do You Really Want To Hurt Me is quite spooky.