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My family and I saw the new dramatic musical movie, DRUMMER BOY, featuring Joel Smallbone, who along with his brother Luke Smallbone are the popular music duo called For King and Country. I loved it and recommend it as a must-see Christmas movie.
When I first started seeing ads for this Angel Studios distributed film several months ago, I instantly wanted to see it because it takes place during the American Revolution, which I’ve studied and written about for decades.
DRUMMER BOY shows a side of the American Revolution that we don’t often think about. The American Revolution was a civil war because it divided and separated families. For example, George Washington’s artillery commander, Henry Knox, was a patriot from Boston, but his father-in-law was a loyalist. When his wife Lucy chose him over her parents, she paid a hefty price. Lucy became estranged from her parents. Ben Franklin experienced something similar. He and his loyalist son became estranged as well.
DRUMMER BOY shows a similar situation. It’s about a pair of brothers who find themselves fighting on opposite sides of the Revolutionary War. Jeremiah Clem, played by Joel Smallbone, fights with British soldiers while his brother Ben Clem, played by Lucas Leach, is a drummer boy for the patriots. They must decide to forgive each other.
The movie starts with the Clem family migrating to America years before the American Revolution. This has a parallel to the Smallbone family’s migration story. When Joel was a child, he came to America from Australia with his parents and many siblings. On the red carpet of the movie’s premiere, Joel described DRUMMER BOY this way:
“It’s a love story, as immigrants to this country. It’s a love story to family, to brotherhood. It’s a love story to forgiveness and freedom—these great biblical Jesus ideas—and it’s a love story to our journey. This movie wrote us more than we wrote it,” Joel Smallbone.
A real brotherly reconciliation is also behind DRUMMER BOY, as director Ben Smallbone recently explained. After brothers Ben and Joel worked together on a previous film, distance grew between them with Ben vowing to never work with Joel again. Then, the pair got together in person, talked it out, forgave each other and then came together stronger than ever as co-directors on DRUMMER BOY.
I’ve been encouraging groups I’ve spoken to this year to do at least one thing to reconnect with the stories of the American Revolution by reading just one book or watching just one movie. DRUMMER BOY is a great way to rediscover history through the relatable, timeless theme of family and forgiveness.
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