The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria Callas singing the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen and concludes with its continuation by Dion in her days of glory. It is intensely moving regardless of whether you have a taste for this extraordinary French Canadian galleon of a singer. It’s the story of how she is afflicted with Stiff Person Syndrome which – mercifully – afflicts only one person in every million and makes Dion’s voice go haywire leaping octaves. Celine Dion comes across as tough and formidable in the face of her ordeal.

The culture is looking pretty variegated. The Disney Beauty and the Beast is causing whooping ecstasy in adults and their young charges. But there’s plenty of highbrowism too. Brett Dean’s Hamlet directed by that maximally versatile man of the theatre Neil Armfield is finally making it to the Opera House. And if you want a different kind of operatic adaptation there’s the semi-staged production by Anne-Louise Sarks, the head of the Melbourne Theatre Company, of an operatic version of Lars Von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves by Royce Vavrek at Hamer Hall.

And then there’s the remarkable fact that Boy Swallows Universe from the novel by Trent Dalton has just been nominated for a lot of Logies. It makes abundant sense because Trent Dalton’s novel not only sold over a million copies but has led to a Netflix adaptation worthy of the book and is utterly compelling in its own right.

It was weird back in 2018 when reliable readers said the novel by the journalist who had a rough drug-laden childhood was the real thing, a popular novel of compelling readability but also the kind of truth associated with literature, the sort of symbolic truth that is more than a racketing story, however fast it moves and however much it entertains. The young hero Eli has to confront the formidable Vietnamese drug queen Bich Dang (Haiha Le in the streamer) and she looms before him like a majestic power, grand and terrible.

But let’s stick to the Netflix streamer (which of course reproduces this). It’s a dazzling piece with Jocelyn Moorhouse directing several episodes, a beautiful script by John Collee and Trent Dalton himself among the producers.

Eli declares that a good day at school is a physical impossibility. He lives with his brother Gus (Lee Tiger Halley) who is a mute (and is closer in age in the streamer) but who draws prophecies in the air which are premonitions of a future which is vivid but never glimpsed whole. Later, through dire necessity, he makes it clear that he can speak. Felix Cameron as Eli gives a wonderful performance and deserves every award going. It is one of the most striking bits of acting in Australian history and it creates a feeling of awe that so much talent can achieve such an effect of emotional reality. The two boys (in this version), four years apart, live with their mother Frances Bell (Phoebe Tonkin) who has given up using drugs but who lives with Lyle (Travis Fimmel) who is dealing again and putting everyone at risk.

People lose fingers, people lose heads. The logic of Boy Swallows Universe would be an over-the-top magical realism if the element of dark abracadabra were not mitigated by an utterly credible realism. The hero penetrates his mother’s gaol at one point – she has confessed to a crime she has not committed – and the narrative inventiveness is jaunty and gleaming but the real trick with this pretty magnificent streamer is the way what is far out in its vision is buttressed by the human feeling it generates. Phoebe Tonkin, as the mother, is utterly real through every strange story twist and one of the striking things about this streamer is the way this performance (nominated for the best lead actress Logie) has no hint of vanity in it. Tonkin just walks away from any possibility of milking it.

There is also Bryan Brown as Slim Halliday, a man who spent decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit but who believes there are always the unseen crimes we did. It is a superb characterisation of a wise old man and it’s hard to imagine Bryan Brown not winning the best supporting actor award though he’s competing with Lee Tiger Halley and Travis Fimmel.

The streamer that follows with such respect in Trent Dalton’s wake (and in all sorts of ways tightening it dramatically and improving the story) is a tremendous homage to the underdog and the fact that the good characters are mired in lives of drug dealing and crime shows the vividness of the palette and the ability to present the light that can shine on up against it people.

Needless to say, there are – very grimly and scarily – characters who are pure lethal evil, including Ivan Kroll (Christopher James Baker) who harrows the soul. And there are also characters like the boys’ father Robert, an agoraphobic recovering alcoholic played with grace and hesitancy and very believable power by Simon Baker. Weirdly – but why not? – this puts him in competition with Felix Cameron as Eli.

How strange that Boy Swallows Universe is creating an audience that parallels its initial readership.

None of which is to say there are no flaws. When one character decides to give away a huge amount of money it is a bridge too far. And there’s also a problem when Eli grows up and turns into Zac Burgess. There’s nothing wrong with the performance but Zac Burgess’s Eli looks as if he went to a posh school like Sydney’s Riverview. He looks like a scion of the Australian upper-middle class who might well make it as a cadet journalist because of his pure panache.

But dramatically the characterisation belongs to a different universe. It is poised, it is alert, it is attractive but it comes from a more conventional world, one that has luckily made a somersault towards success but the denouement of Boy Swallows Universe remains a tour de force of excitement as we witness the unveiling of a rich man played with great pomp and circumstance by Anthony LaPaglia.