When the English director Kirk Jones met John Davidson to explain that he wanted to direct a film about his life, the first thing Davidson told him was: “Fuck!” But it wasn't a spontaneous invitation to fuck but one of the verbal tics that have marked his life since he was 14, when he developed Tourette's syndrome. Davidson went from being a normal teenager who got good grades and had a group of friends to being marginalized at school within weeks, labeled as crazy, beaten by his classmates, and on occasion, arrested by the police. His struggle to have a dignified life, relate to others, and find a job are the raw material of Incontrolable (I swear), the film inspired by Davidson, which premieres this Friday and is already one of the great successes of British cinema in the last decade, with more than a million viewers in theaters in the UK and awards such as the Bafta for best actor for Robert Aramayo, who beat, among others, Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet.

The scene with which Incontrolable (I swear) begins is one of the most talked about in the life of John Davidson, the real person who inspires the film (and who had already been the subject of several previous documentaries). At the reception where he was to be decorated by Elizabeth II, he blurted out a "Fuck the queen". A moment that illustrates this uncontrollable condition of Tourette's syndrome, a disorder characterized by the irrepressible verbal and gestural tics that affect the person. And a scene that sets the tone for a film perfectly framed within the best tradition of the British working-class feel-good movie with a vocation to raise awareness about some issue, which includes titles like Full Monty, I Want to Be Like Beckham, or, in part, the recent Pillion. The film generates immediate empathy towards this nervous man in the face of royal protocol, while using humor of assumable irreverence to present the conflict. If the Queen of England was not offended by this outburst, who are we mere mortals to not accept with understanding the disruptions of a person with Tourette's, however aggressive they may sound?