Screenwriter Lee Hall grew up like Billy in a tough mining town in northern England. He found his escape and salvation through writing plays and poetry. When he wanted to put his adolescent experiences into a screenplay, he realized that a film about a kid who likes to write doesn’t make much visual candy. So he made Billy’s source of inspiration dancing instead.

If a movie about a ballet dancing 11 year old boy doesn’t sound all that appealing, maybe this will help. The dancing in Billy Elliot is set to a raucous mix of lively tunes. There’s more T-Rex than Swan Lake. The best of Billy Elliot is the dancing. Billy dances in the streets and in the studio, mixing styles — jazz, tap, ballet, and his own inventive improv — with joyous abandon.

Billy Elliot is set in 1984, in the middle of the miners’ strikes that were extremely bitter and fueled intense class antagonism. Billy is caught in the middle of the difficult, desperate situation that is destroying his town, and also in the middle of a family situation where grief and disappointment are expressed as anger.

Billy’s mother’s death is rarely spoken of, but her loss hovers over everything that happens at home. Billy takes care of his sometimes lucid grandmother. He tries not to antagonize his perpetually angry father and brother. They are miners on strike. Dad and “our Tony” are as hard as the times. When there is no money for heat, they break up Billy’s mum’s old piano and burn it to warm the house on Christmas.

Billy’s father wants him to box, to learn a defense against the difficult world. Billy has little interest and less ability when it comes to boxing, but becomes intrigued by the dancing lessons happening in the other half of the gym. He is drawn into dancing by the teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, who knows just how to tease, demand, pretend to ignore and challenge Billy into taking dancing seriously.

Everyone in Billy Elliot is a prickly character, which keeps the unabashed sentimentality of the story from cloying. Unsurprisingly, when dad and Tony find out Billy is dancing, they do not approve, to put it mildly. They worry that Billy is a “poof,” and that their friends will think they are “poofs” also. They put a stop to the dancing, but only temporarily. Billy and Mrs. Wilkinson are as obstinate and hard-headed as their opposition, and Billy’s dad understands all too well the dead end future his young son faces if he doesn’t do something other than mining.

When it comes time for Billy to travel to London to audition for the Royal Ballet School, Dad and the whole town are rooting for Billy. But just because Dad has a change of heart, doesn’t means he goes totally soft. As Billy and his dad are interviewed by the icy, pretentious and ever so gently condescending admissions panel, both Billy and his dad feel deeply that they are in a world where they are neither respected or accepted.

Billy Elliot acknowledges, in a way its Hollywood counterparts rarely do, that triumph and success have a price, that for every great gain, there is also loss. This is director Stephen Daldry’s film debut. But as a respected stage director, it isn’t surprising that he has a good feel for balancing the celebratory and sober elements of the story. Daldry also has a real feel for casting. Julie Waters, who made her feature debut in Educating Rita as a working class woman receiving instruction, gives a wonderfully restrained performance as the disappointed, chain-smoking Mrs. Wilkinson. She isn’t so mired in her own frustrations that she can’t recognize and inspire the kind of talent teachers hope to find.

And the talent she spies in Billy lights up the screen. Even if you still aren’t sure a ballet dancing boy is your cup of tea, the sheer joy and exuberance that shines through the performance of Jamie Bell as Billy Elliot simply shouldn’t be missed. Daldry is extremely lucky to have found an actor who so completely embodies the character of Billy. Bell is caught at the perfect moment. He’s still a boy, though just barely. With his big ears, wiry frame and serious expression, he conveys all the awkwardness of an inexperienced grief-stricken child. But dancing transforms him, and as he learns to smile and enjoy, you witness a delightful transformation. He tells the admissions panel that when he’s dancing, he feels like electricity. When he’s dancing, that electricity shoots through the audience too.