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A heart-warming, slightly bogus, rites-of-passage drama, Billy Elliot, the first feature film of the theatre director Stephen Daldry, is a highly effective, rather calculating drama about an 11-year-old boy in a mining village who takes up classical dance, to the horror of his family.

Billy's mother is recently dead. His father and older brother are drowning their grief in industrial action. The only woman left in the family, his Gran, wanders in her mind (and out of the house) and doesn't recognise him.

Only in these circumstances could the sarcastic discipline of the ballet teacher Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters, keeping her charm within bounds), chain-smoking, barely glancing at the pupils she drills, look like a way of escape.

Lee Hall's script takes place during the miners' strike of 1984, but the director hasn't set the film straightforwardly in period. Songs on the soundtrack are from the 1970s rather than the 1980s, T. Rex rather than, say, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Lynne Ramsay's haunting film of last year, Ratcatcher, also featured a strike (of Glasgow dustbinmen in the mid-1970s) and a refusal of the safeness of a period setting. When the period is recent, audiences are vulnerable to the same cosy distractions, with a slightly different emphasis: not "Did they really wear those clothes?" but "Did we?".

The first hint of a larger, menacing world comes early on in Billy Elliot: as Billy (the remarkable Jamie Bell) rounds up his demented Gran from her wanderings, the camera shows policemen massing on the ridge. Less poetically than Ratcatcher, sometimes with a certain cuteness, the film shows a child's perspective on adult events. When the ballet teacher's daughter Debbie tries to persuade him ballet isn't just for poofs (look at that Wayne Sleep, he's very fit), she drags a stick along the walls and doesn't even notice when the wall is replaced at their eye level by a row of interlocked riot shields.

The suspect status of ballet for boys preoccupies the male characters. Is Billy just different, or is he Different? The screenplay handles the issue gracefully by delegating the proto-gay struggles to Billy's best friend. The two things are connected only in the sense that the two outsiders gain strength from each other.

In the opening sequence, we see Billy jumping for joy in slow motion against a background of wallpaper. Daldry stretches realism without disrupting it by making the wall absurdly broad and tall. The pattern of the wallpaper, repeated on this scale, takes on some of the imposingness of a Gilbert and George picture.

If this isn't as impressive a directorial debut as Sam Mendes's American Beauty, it's still full of fine moments. When Billy and Mrs Wilkinson travel with the car on a transporter bridge while she tells him the story of Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky's music lends its grandeur to industrial architecture that might otherwise look merely functional.

It's only after the halfway point that the film's elements start to break up. The dance sequences (strongly choreographed by Peter Darling) edge uneasily towards the conventions of the musical, by beginning to comment on the action. So Billy dances out his anger and frustration in a tap routine, though tap isn't something Mrs Wilkinson teaches. Surprised by his Scottish father (Gary Lewis) while persisting with ballet, Billy launches into a display based on a third tradition - Highland dancing. This is dramatically eloquent, the son showing the father that a virile combative dance style is actually part of his heritage, but in realistic terms it's absurd.

Realism begins to make an orderly retreat, as the forces of heartwarmingness grow ever stronger. While Mrs Wilkinson and Billy are rehearsing a routine to T. Rex's I Love To Boogie, Daldry crafts an ingratiating sequence in which Billy's brother plays along with carpet-sweeper guitar to the same song on his headphones, while Gran takes up dimly-remembered dance positions in her room. Even Dad joins in with melodic gargling from the bathroom.

That early moment which showed private and public, Gran and the police, in the same shot but not the same frame, seemed to promise a productive tension between Billy's world and the world of the strike, neither being subordinated to the other. That all goes by the board when Dad sacrifices the integrity of his politics so that Billy can have a chance at ballet school. He crosses a picket line and endures the humiliation of sharing a bus with scabs he once scorned.

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