Christopher and His Kind presents a stunning piece of LGBT history with this BBC-produced dramatization of novelist Christopher Isherwood’s 1976 memoir. Recounting the English-American writer’s years in 1930s Germany, this is the true story of Isherwood’s celebrated The Berlin Stories, which served as the basis for the Broadway musical and film Cabaret.

In the 1930s, Isherwood moved to hedonistic Berlin “because of the boys.” But he also moved there to pursue his burgeoning writing career and to escape England and the stifling expectations of his snobbish mother (Lindsay Duncan, HBO’s Rome). Handsome Matt Smith (the U.K.’s latest Dr. Who) plays the young Isherwood as the film beautifully captures his relationships with the poet W.H. Auden, flatmate Jean Ross (Isherwood’s real life friend and the basis for his immortal character Sally Bowles) and the Jewish, upper class Wilfrid Landauer (Iddo Goldberg, Secret Diary of a Call Girl). Against the intoxicating backdrop of Berlin’s gay subculture during the waning bacchanalia of the Weimar Republic, Isherwood falls hopelessly in love with Heinz Neddermayer — yet their relationship faces impossible challenges in the face of the gathering storm of the rise of the Nazi party.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Isherwood and his works with Tom Ford’s A Single Man and the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (Frameline32) that chronicled the author’s 35-year relationship with artist Don Bachardy. Christopher and His Kind gives us the story of this beloved author’s early years in his own eloquent words.