Breakfast on Pluto (2005) Review: Charm Against the Troubles

Is Breakfast on Pluto worth watching?

Mostly yes. Breakfast on Pluto is a scrappy, uneven picaresque held together by one of Cillian Murphy’s most fearless performances, and that performance alone justifies the trip. Neil Jordan tells the story of Kitten, a young trans woman from a small Irish town, as a chain of glam-pop episodes that swing between whimsy and the violence of the Troubles. That tonal mix is both the film’s signature and its weakness: some chapters sing, others feel like detours, and at over two hours the road gets long.

What is Breakfast on Pluto about?

Breakfast on Pluto follows Kitten (Cillian Murphy), a foundling raised in a small town near the Irish border who never fits the part the town has written for her. Too flamboyant for the parish and too unbothered to hide it, she eventually leaves for 1970s London, looking for love, somewhere to belong and the mother who abandoned her as a baby.

Along the way she drifts through a series of unlikely lives and companions, played by a deep Irish bench: Liam Neeson as the local priest, Stephen Rea as a stage magician, Ruth Negga as her closest childhood friend and Brendan Gleeson in a small comic part. Bryan Ferry turns up, too, in a brief and quietly menacing role.

Jordan adapted the film with Patrick McCabe from McCabe’s novel. It is an Irish production in English, running 128 minutes, and it sits between drama and comedy without committing fully to either.

Murphy makes Kitten impossible to dismiss

Released the same year Murphy played the Scarecrow in Batman Begins, this is the performance that showed how far his range stretched. He plays Kitten without a trace of caricature. Her weapon is flippancy: she meets hostile teachers, suspicious policemen and dangerous men with a soft voice, a raised eyebrow and a refusal to take their contempt seriously. Murphy lets you see what that lightness costs, so the moments when her composure slips land hard.

The supporting cast gives him plenty to play against. Neeson’s priest is a man whose kindness is tangled up with discomfort, and Rea, a regular in Jordan’s films, brings a lovely weariness to the magician who takes Kitten under his wing. Negga, early in her career, has a warmth that makes the scenes back home feel like more than a prologue.

Jordan’s glam-rock scrapbook

Jordan structures the film as a series of short, titled chapters and pours a jukebox of 1960s and 1970s pop over them, so the story plays like a scrapbook Kitten might have kept herself. The whimsy goes a long way: there are subtitled robins, fantasy sequences and costume changes that treat reinvention as survival rather than vanity.

Running underneath is the other Ireland of the period. Bombs, checkpoints and paramilitary threats keep intruding on Kitten’s daydreams, and the film’s best idea is that her refusal to pick a side, political or otherwise, is its own form of courage. Few films of the era set a queer coming-of-age story so directly against the Troubles, and Jordan, who knows this territory well, keeps the danger real even when the tone is playful.

Where the picaresque loses its way

The episodic structure is also the film’s biggest problem. Some chapters are sharp and funny; others feel like sketches that exist mainly to move Kitten to the next place. Because she is so rarely allowed to be the one making choices, the middle stretch can feel passive, and the search for her mother, which should be the spine of the story, sometimes disappears for long periods. The film’s shifts from comedy to brutality are deliberate, but not all of them are earned, and 128 minutes is more than this material needs.

Who should watch Breakfast on Pluto?

It suits viewers who like character-driven drama with a comic, slightly surreal streak, and anyone interested in Murphy’s work before his biggest roles. Patience helps; this is a meandering film that rewards mood over momentum. Expect sexual content, references to sex work, homophobic and transphobic hostility, and scenes of political violence, which make it best suited to adults.

Where to go next:

• Interview with the Vampire, Jordan’s lavish Hollywood take on outsiders who reinvent themselves to survive.
• The Magdalene Sisters, a far darker look at the Church’s hold over Irish lives in the same broad era.
• Poor Things, another stylised story of a heroine building an identity on her own terms.

The verdict

Breakfast on Pluto is a tender, messy and often charming film that never quite finds the shape its lead performance deserves. Murphy’s Kitten is funny, brave and unforgettable, and Jordan’s sense of place is sharp; the wandering structure keeps it from being the classic it occasionally threatens to become.

Rating: 3.5/5