"Kinky Boots."

Friday, April 14, 2006 | 10:39 AM

"I CAME for the adulation." Postulation: "The Full Monty" flicks (British Economy Porn?) have taken the place Merchant Ivory's films once held in the hearts of the middlebrow rental crowd. Costumes and mild crescendos of pent-up emotion have been replaced by plucky, whey-faced types overcoming (in a somewhat expanded crescendo of pent-up emotion) a economy-related crushing loss of self-worth through some sort of inappropriate side project (and that's a lame summation, but you know what we're talking about). They're given mild weight by the fact that they're often based on a true story, and their inevitable uplifting end triumph is made bittersweet by the fact that the larger problems looming in the film's background remain. "Brassed Off," "Billy Elliot," "Greenfingers," "Saving Grace"...last week's "On A Clear Day" was one, if a rather clunky one that fumbled the minor epiphanies of its side characters and failed to create a real sense that the main character was really training all that hard. And Julian Jarrold's "Kinky Boots" is most definitely one.

The economic plot driver in "Kinky Boots" is a century-old Northampton quality shoe factory on the verge of going under because no one wants sensible, well-made brogues anymore. Charlie Price (the nearly featureless Joel Edgerton) reluctant inherits the company from his father, only to find it nearly bankrupt. On a trip to London to find new buyers, he runs into Lola (birth name Simon, and played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), your typical sassy, singing drag queen in red vinyl boots. And wouldn't you know, the heels on those boot will insist on breaking?

"Kinky Boots" gets plenty right — it skims efficiently through Charlie's father's death and the factory's crisis to adroitly deliver the money shots like the cinematic freebase they are: Lola sashaying through the factory and scandalizing the conservative workers; Lola winning those workers over with a combination of snappy comebacks and arm-wrestling technique; the factory workers rallying to work through the night to produce a fine line of transvestite footwear in time for the Milan Shoe Fair (hell, formulas stick around for a reason). The extraordinarily charismatic Ejiofor vamps and swans and then changes into a turtleneck (!) and angsts over his relationship with father. Charlie remains a non-entity and his character arc is muddy, but he still manages to free himself from his waspish fiancee and end up in the arms of one of his younger, spunkier employees.

Of course, mildly cheeky is a far as the film goes, and for all of her shouting to the employees that what they are creating is not a pair of boots, it is "two and a half feet of irresistible tubular sex!", we never get a sense that Lola/Simon would ever engage in anything so mundane — she hovers about the film's drab Midlands setting like a vinyl-clad fairy (no offensive double-meaning intended), facilitating plot and character development while needing (and getting) nothing back in return.

Opens in limited release.