Good Luck To You, Leo Grande — Emma Thompson cruises through sex-work comedy

The mid-range hotel room that backdrops sweet-and-sour sex comedy Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is perfectly nice. You would struggle though to call it erotic. Ideal then for a film set in the limbo between fantasy and reality. The room has been booked by Nancy (Emma Thompson), 60-ish and dressed for a sales conference, shoes slipped off as if about to check a PowerPoint presentation.

Instead, another character arrives: Leo (Daryl McCormack), poised, considerably younger, soon semi-naked. He is a sex worker. Nancy is his client. It is very much her first time doing this. Viscerally uncomfortable, she is at least pleased to learn he is using the money to fund his education. He lets her believe it for all of, oh, 10 seconds. Sometimes even fantasies have to be honest.

Truthfully, the film is almost not a film at all, but a stage two-hander director Sophie Hyde works hard to give big-screen zing. The energy flows first from the ping-pong of Nancy’s anguished fluster and Leo’s ease in his own skin, somewhere between hyper-professional and confessor. It is only sex, he smiles, and this is just his job. Hers used to be teaching religious education. Now her unmet desires — poignantly basic — are presented as attainment goals, in list form. (“We’ll make a significant dent in it,” Leo assures her.)

There are times Katy Brand’s script seems bullet-pointed too, sensibly checking off discussions of body image or the ethics of sex work for all parties. But the writing is mostly more graceful than that. Franker and funnier as well. And if, like Nancy’s wishlist, the drama goes nowhere very kinky, it is sharp in uncovering two secret histories.

Of the pair, Leo is slower to bloom into life — by design — but McCormack does well. Still, the film belongs to Thompson. She makes nailing the comedy look effortless, while bringing a note of something like loss to the tale of a sex life barely lived at all. The performance conjures her character whole, clichés stripped off and left on the bedroom floor.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas in the UK and on Hulu in the US from June 17