Winner of the Best Feature Audience Award at last year's London Film Festival, this depicts gay lifestyles in the face of adversity - although this time the enemy isn't AIDS but 60s homophobia and police persecution, the combination of which led to the legendary riots at Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn one fateful, sweltering June night in 1969.
Fresh-faced, Midnight Cowboy-type Matty Dean (Weller) is the new hunk in town hungry for a peer group. He is torn between a group of bitching drag queens, led by the ever-pouting La Miranda (Diaz), and the Homophiles - a very civilised, middle-class protest group who insist on sensible clothing and haircuts at their dull as ditchwater demos.
To make a political point, the latter group set out to prove they're always refused a drink if they announce they are homosexual in whatever New York bar they visit. In fact, the ultimate irony is they can only guarantee that happening in the Stonewall Bar itself - its regular clientele and staff petrified that overtly gay behaviour will only attract trouble.
Directed with flair and compassion by the BBC's Nigel Finch, who died as the movie was being completed, this is an astutely observed and brilliantly acted recreation of recent history, even if its stop-start mix of straightforward emotional drama and cabaret comment (a Greek chorus of drag divas) makes for occasionally bumpy viewing. A shame, too, that the riot scenes look oddly studio bound and small scale, although it's the bittersweet details that still tug at your heart.