Movies Like Prick Up Your Ears

If you liked Prick Up Your Ears (1987), a drama movie directed by Stephen Frears, here are 20 movies with a similar feel, based on TMDB's recommendations. Each one links to its cast, trailer and where it's streaming.

1
Wilde (1997)
★ 6.6/10Also drama
Oscar Wilde is a married playwright who has occasionally indulged his weakness for male suitors. After much toil, Wilde debuts 'The Importance of Being Earnest' in London, and a chat at the theatre with Lord Alfred…
2
Rocketman (2019)
★ 7.3/10Also drama
The story of Elton John's life, from his years as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music through his influential and enduring musical partnership with Bernie Taupin.
3
Sebastian (2024)
★ 6.5/10Also drama
Max is a 25-year-old freelance writer and aspiring novelist who seems well on his way to success in London’s cultural spheres. Yet by night, he finds a different kind of exhilaration as a sex worker with the pseudonym…
4
Cracks (2009)
★ 6.6/10Also drama
Jealousy flares after the headmistress of an elite boarding school for girls becomes obsessed with a new student.
5
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
★ 7/10Also drama
The story of two radically different men thrown together in a Latin American prison cell. One is Valentin, a journalist being tortured for his political beliefs. The other is Molina, a gay window-dresser who fills…
6
The Boys in the Band (2020)
★ 6.8/10Also drama
At a birthday party in 1968 New York, a surprise guest and a drunken game leave seven gay friends reckoning with unspoken feelings and buried truths.
7
Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)
★ 6.5/10Also drama
Recently divorced career woman Alex Greville begins a romantic relationship with glamorous mod artist Bob Elkin, fully aware that he's also intimately involved with middle-aged doctor Daniel Hirsh. For both Alex and…
8
Suffragette (2015)
★ 7.2/10Also drama
Based on true events about the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.
9
The Basketball Diaries (1995)
★ 7.4/10Also drama
A high school basketball player’s life turns upside down after free-falling into the harrowing world of drug addiction.
10
Nickel Boys (2024)
★ 6.6/10Also drama
Chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.
11
I Am Woman (2020)
★ 6.2/10Also drama
In 1966, Helen Reddy landed in New York with her three year old daughter, a suitcase, and $230 in her pocket. Within weeks, she was broke. Within months, she was in love. Within five years, she was one of the biggest…
12
Stonewall (2015)
★ 6/10Also drama
Kicked out by his parents, a gay teenager leaves small-town Indiana for New York's Greenwich Village, where growing discrimination against the gay community leads to riots on June 28, 1969.
13
Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007)
★ 7.4/10Also drama
Story about the remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator and a chaotic homeless man, whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison.
14
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
★ 7.5/10Also drama
Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to…
15
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
★ 7.8/10Also drama
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1991. High school freshman Charlie is a wallflower, always watching life from the sidelines, until two senior students, Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, become his mentors, helping him…
16
The Danish Girl (2015)
★ 7.5/10Also drama
When Gerda Wegener asks her husband Einar to fill in as a portrait model, Einar discovers the person she's meant to be and begins living her life as Lili Elbe. Having realized her true self and with Gerda's love and…
17
The Dresser (2015)
★ 6.2/10Also drama
One fateful night in a small English regional theatre during World War II a troupe of touring actors stage a production of Shakespeares King Lear. Bombs are falling, sirens are wailing, the curtain is up in an hour but…
18
The Catcher Was a Spy (2018)
★ 6.2/10Also drama
Former major league baseball player Moe Berg lives a double life working for the Office of Strategic Services in World War II Europe.
19
Kidulthood (2006)
★ 6.3/10Also drama
A day in the life of a group of troubled 15-year-olds growing up in west London.
20
Apt Pupil (1998)
★ 6.5/10Also drama
One day in 1984, Todd Bowden, a brilliant high school boy fascinated by the history of Nazism, stumbles across an old man whose appearance resembles that of Kurt Dussander, a wanted Nazi war criminal. A month later…