Based on a true story and characters with an excellent mini-documentary feature attached. It’s 1984 in London and the miners are on strike as Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party move against one of the last bastions of union power in Britain with police and scabs with the goal of closing many pits. A gay Irish-born militant in London named Mark Ashton (NY-born actor Ben Schnetzer, good, but the accent’s not quite right) gets the idea to support their struggle as a way to link gay and worker rights. Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) is born out of this, and they connect with one isolated Welsh mining town. What follows is the story of growth, connection, and conflict as miners rooted in traditional versions of family life struggle to overcome their homophobia to come together with these folks. Life at the start of the AIDS epidemic. Death and homophobia are everywhere. It’s not a great film, but it is a very good one and one well worth seeing. It is deeply moving and humane with a powerful conclusion, and it’s often very funny. It is uplifting about life in times of crisis and the power of solidarity and the meaning of mutual support. A bit too clean and simple?. Yes. But this one is, nonetheless, about a part of the struggle for human dignity in the West that has yielded some positive changes over the past forty years even as workers’ rights have declined. It begins with Pete Seeger and ends with Billy Bragg. We both really liked this film.