It's All Gone Pete Tong

 It's not easy to find a film about someone living with a disability that isn't insulting, schmaltzy or smug in some way. In most cases, said disability is used as either base comedy fodder or a cynical tool of audience manipulation. Whether it's a cheap joke or a blatant piece of Oscar bait, the subject of disability — especially ones that are overcome in some manner — is rarely tackled with any sort of artistic success.

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, It's All Gone Pete Tong could have been a terrible mess. As a comedy-drama about Frankie Wilde, a DJ overcoming deafness and regaining his success, it could have been the worst of both worlds. But Michael Dowse is not your average director and, as a result, Tong is far from your average inspirational story. Using the same mockumentary structure as his last film Fubar, Dowse throws us into the crazy world of Ibiza dance culture.

In a sea of gorgeous colours bright enough — not to mention beats pulsating enough — to make the rave movie Go feel like a drab period piece, the audience is introduced to legendary Wilde in his prime. As his peers discuss the tragedy and triumph of his life and the strange mystery of his disappearance, we're presented with a fictionalized account of this true story. At the start of the film, Frankie (played by Paul Kaye, who throws himself headlong into the role with amazing results) is happy, successful, blissfully drug-addled and oblivious.

When he's not rocking the clubs or hanging out with his beautiful model wife, he's busy giving amusing and pseudo-profound interviews to the press. His thoughts and problems don't get any deeper than pondering whether or not he should have his own brand of hummus. Things start to go wrong for Frankie when he discovers that he's losing his hearing. When a freak recording accident renders him completely deaf, his life completely falls apart.

His success crumbles, his wife leaves him and he finds himself reduced to a desperate shell of a man, locked in his home with nothing but his demons to keep him company. In some of the movie's darkest and funniest scenes, he's visited and beaten senseless by the tutu-clad Coke badger, a ridiculous but effective metaphor for Frankie's drug addiction. Frankie eventually triumphs in the face of his disability with the help of a beautiful sign language instructor, but it's not the cop-out happy ending that it seems on paper.

Effortlessly balancing pathos and humour — just like with Fubar's testicle cancer plot — Dowse manages to bring all of the elements of the story together into a film that inspires but never panders. The combination of Dowse's skilled storytelling and Kaye's lively performance raises It's All Gone Pete Tong far above any of the possible artistic snares of the plot and subject matter. What we're left with is a genuinely funny, human and entertaining piece of cinema.