L'écossais volant

SYNOPSIS

Jonny Lee Miller delivers possibly his best performance in a decade playing Scottish cycling star Graeme Obree, the misfit who took on the establishment on a home-made bike (which famously included parts from a washing machine) and set a series of records in the 1990s. It was not only on the track that Obree found himself in a race against time, however, for as quickly as he would break a record, the sport's snooty administrators would make up new rules designed to prevent the upstart from doing so again. Obree suffered from clinical depression, but despite the dark psychological undertones, The Flying Scotsman remains an old-fashioned drama of personal triumph and athletic glory against the odds, with an obsessive protagonist, a jokey sidekick (Billy Boyd) and a long-suffering (and woefully underwritten) wife (Laura Fraser). An uplifting, feel-good tale, it belongs to a great British tradition that includes Chariots of Fire, and might well have been challenging for Oscars if it had come out 30 years earlier.