Billy Elliot just wants to dance.
Billy is the 11-year-old son of coal miner Jackie (Rich Hebert) and brother of Tony (Cullen R. Titmas), another miner. Mum (Molly Garner) has died, though she turns up from time to time in fantasy sequences, but Billy’s spunky Grandma (Patti Perkins) is still around, and has one of the best songs.
The place is Durham County; the time, 1984, the year British prime minister Margaret Thatcher decided to break the union much the way her friend Ronald Reagan had broken the U.S. air traffic controllers’ union three years earlier.