Decades before fake heiress Anna Delvey, Tinder swindler Shimon Hayut and start-up scammer Elizabeth Holmes became household names, another scandalous imposter triggered a media sensation in Scotland and beyond. Revisiting this bizarre true story almost 30 years later, documentary director Jono McLeod tells a tragicomic saga of audacious trickery and unreliable memory in My Old School. The anchoring presence of renowned Scottish stage and screen star Alan Cumming, giving one of his most unusual performances to date, is a strong selling point.
McLeod’s assured debut feature mostly plays with the stylistic grammar of high-school teen movies: classroom crushes, geeky outsiders, mean-girl cliques and comically pompous teachers, all set to a jaunty jukebox soundtrack of vintage pop songs. But the back story has become increasingly tinged with melancholy over the decades as the protagonists drift into middle age with unresolved issue and unanswered questions. Launched online at Sundance in January, My Old School had its physical premiere on home turf at Glasgow Film Festival in March, with more fest slots to follow including Canada’s Hot Docs in late April. With audience interest in frauds and scammers currently at a premium, this entertaining docu-memoir should find a healthy audience on either big screen or streaming platform. Magnolia have signed up North American rights, with a planned July release.
New kid on the block Brandon Lee immediately struck his teenage classmates as odd back in 1993 when he enrolled at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow, a well-regarded high school in one of Scotland’s most leafy, wealthy suburbs. Lee’s mature appearance and mannered Canadian accent attracted mockery and gossip, but he soon impressed students and teachers alike with his intelligence, glamorous family connections and cool music taste. He also proved to be a kindly soul, befriending and defending one of the school’s few black pupils against racist bullies. Only two years later did the bizarre true story break as “Brandon Lee” was exposed as 30-year-old Glasgow native Brian MacKinnon, who had posed as a Canadian teen to spend a year attending his old school, even fooling some of his former teachers.
A contemporary of MacKinnon at Bearsden Academy, McLeod is unusually well placed to tell this story, which he assembles using a collage of straight interviews with other former classmates, dramatic reconstructions, vintage photos and archive footage. He recreates key events using playfully retro 2D animation and a vocal cast headlined by actor-musicians Lulu and Claire Grogan alongside fellow Glaswegian Dawn Steele. There are playfully allusive games at work here, since all three had breakthrough roles in feted high-school dramas: Lulu in To Sir With Love (1967), Grogan in Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Steele in Gregory’s Two Girls (1999).
Although MacKinnon declined to appear in McLeod’s film, for reasons that are implied but never quite explained, he did consent to a lengthy audio interview. In a textbook example of turning an obstacle into an opportunity, the director then cast Cumming as MacKinnon’s avatar, lip-syncing seamlessly to pre-recorded dialogue. An imposter of an imposter, this experimental performance works a treat, mainly because Cumming is so skilled at nuanced facial expression. In a pleasingly meta twist, he was previously front-runner to play MacKinnon in a more conventional dramatic feature that stalled more than 20 years ago.
MacKinnon’s confessional testimony tells its own colourful story, both as subtext and text. With the silky self-assurance of a skilled con man, he boasts about his cool-headed fraud, genius-level IQ and “mind control” abilities, but turns bitter when protesting his humiliating treatment after he was exposed. He comes across as a smart, cultured but not entirely reliable narrator. Meanwhile, McLeod forensically unpicks his motives and methods, sporadically rewinding scenes to show conflicting memories of various events in a Rashomon style. The director holds back archive photos and video footage of the real MacKinnon until later in the film, adding to the sense of a mystery slowly revealing itself like a striptease.
The Brandon Lee saga generated major UK media interest back in 1995, which older British viewers may recall. But many will be coming to these events fresh, so revealing too many twists would be unfair here. While My Old School never fully explains MacKinnon’s psychological drive, thwarted career ambitions and hunger for social status emerge as key factors. Behind this mostly harmless and arguably victimless crime lies the sadder story of a shy, obsessive, working-class child raised by a single mother on the poor fringes of a rich suburb. McLeod, who also grew up in one of Glasgow’s more impoverished neighbourhoods, ends a generally light-hearted film by inviting sharper reflection on lives blighted by inequality and low expectation. Teasingly, he also hints that MacKinnon’s audacious con trick may not be over yet.
Director: Jono McLeod
Cast: Alan Cumming, Clare Grogan, Lulu, Dawn Steele, Joe McFadden
Producers: John Archer, Olivia Lichtenstein
Cinematography: George Geddes
Editing: Berny McGurk, Jono McLeod
Music: Shelly Poole
Animation director: Rory Lowe
Lead animator: Scott Morriss
Production companies: Hopscotch Films (UK), Creative Scotland (UK)
World sales: Dogwoof, London
In English
104 minutes
