Chiwetel Ejiofor in "Kinky Boots"

Oh, the plight of the poor drag queen in recent motion pictures. She’s been pressed into service over the last decade or so as the central figure in a pulp mythology of self-sacrificial but transgressive heroism. New York Times writer Stephen Holden not long ago pointed out that drag queens seem to have replaced that old cinematic cliché of outsidership, the whore with the heart of gold, whose wit, wisdom, tolerance and, ahem, generosity, were always available for a movie’s hero when he was down on his luck—a woman like Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind.

What Holden didn’t note was that the W.W.H.G. usually had more fun, and more of a love life, than the movie’s contemporary drag queen. Sometimes she even got the hero at movie’s end—like Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express.

From To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar over a decade ago, through the limply fey Breakfast on Pluto earlier this year, the drag queen has come to symbolize the sins of the rest of us, serving in movies as a martyr with courage, integrity and outrageous fashion sense. Needless to say, she virtually never gets the guy, if there is one.

Of course, the drag queen’s style need not be wimpy or submissive, even if she’s uplifting others’ lives. Julian Jarrold’s feeble new feel-good comedy Kinky Boots features a drag hero/heroine who’s both salty and seraphic. But Lola (a.k.a. Simon) fits comfortably within the contours of this newer pop archetype. She saves not only the straight guy’s life but his shoe factory, too.

Kinky Boots really belongs to that recent, sub-Ealing genre of movies about doughty, working-class Brits picking themselves up by the bootstraps—here almost literally—and triumphing over lousy circumstances (e.g. The Full Monty, Brassed Off). The movie is said to be “inspired by a true story,” mind you, and sodden inspiration is its operative concept.

In the Midlands city of Northampton, Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) is having a crisis of both conscience and business. He’s the reluctant inheritor of the family shoe company, producer of carefully crafted footwear since the 19th century, and it now seems his late father had been suppressing knowledge of the firm’s perilous condition. Price occupies a dying segment of the industry; people don’t want to pay for superior quality when cheap imports are readily available.

A meet-cute encounter with Lola (Chiwetal Ejiofor) on an unsuccessful trip to London to unload some product provides the impetus for a brainstorm, and a way out of Charlie’s dilemma.

Lola is a six-footer and a well set-up former boxer, courtesy of her severely disapproving father’s efforts to cure her of her perversion with a dose of the sweet science. When Lola notes how often her scarlet boots’ heels break, Charlie suddenly sees the future: Making boots and shoes for men who dress as ladies, ones that are solidly constructed and can stand up to the demands of guys of Lola’s size, even when they’re worn in nightclub acts like the ones in which Lola performs in London. She also insists they meet her own design standard: vertical inches of “tubular sex.”

You just know that this business model will work, despite such obstacles as employee incredulity and resistance, not to mention provincial astonishment and belligerence when Lola pays an unscheduled visit to the factory to check up on progress. Which gives her the opportunity to shrewdly disarm prejudices, create little miracles of good will and teach slow-learner Charlie something about how to design fabulously.

Early scenes seem to indicate that Jarrold has some facility for assembling comedic scenes, but any such ability is soon drowned in a drenching wash of sentimentality. Lola/Simon is a clumsy, assembly-line construct: the brashly witty, sharp-tongued but generous-hearted and insightful queen. Ejiofor is an actor of considerable resources (he can be found plying his skills in the shadow of Denzel Washington’s swaggeringly masculine performance in Spike Lee’s Inside Man), but he can’t do much more than inject a little wryness and an occasional spark of feeling into these proceedings.

Kinky Boots culminates in a mad runway show in Milan that cries out for adaptation to the musical stage or screen. We may hope no one hears and heeds this plea.