A Knight's Tale was fated to be an armour-plated classic

Millennials understood that a film that mixed Heath Ledger, David Bowie and Geoffrey Chaucer couldn’t go far wrong. Patrick Smith hails the return of an anachronistic trendsetter

- Patrick Smith

Did anyone really need a medieval jousting movie scored to Queen and David Bowie? No.

Did millennial audiences in 2001 immediately understand that Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale – out again in cinemas this week - was exactly what they wanted anyway? Absolutely. Five years after Baz Luhrmann had proved that modern soundtracks could electrify period texts in Romeo + Juliet, Helgeland applied the same logic to tournaments in the Middle Ages, and discovered it worked brilliantly. For this is a film so joyous and free of pretentiousness that questions about historical accuracy splinter on impact.

Part of the film's pleasure is indeed how gleefully it flaunts every bizarre, lurid anachronism: peasants hammer wooden stands to “We Will Rock You”, courtly balls pivot to Seventies disco, and the whole thing vibrates with a classic-rock swagger that feels bracingly alive. Heartwarming, too. Tingeing it all with bittersweetness, of course, is Heath Ledger's wonderful lead performance, shot seven years before his death in 2008. The film preserves his beauty in permanent youth.

In many ways, A Knight's Tale is a time capsule from a very specific cultural moment. The story of a peasant squire who seizes his destiny landed at a point when