“What are you gonna do? Lock us all up? We’re in every home. We’re half the human race. You can’t stop us all.” Do you love Carey Mulligan‘s working-class accent or what? She’s playing Maud, a working mother who becomes a convert to the women’s suffrage cause with Meryl Streep playing what looks to be a distinctive supporting role as “outlaw fugitive” Emmeline Pankhurst. But to really rate with the cool kidz Suffragette has to do more than just tell “the story of a movement.” It has to achieve a little more than what last year’s voting rights struggle film (i.e., Selma) did.

Sarah Gavron and Abi Morgan‘s Suffragette (Focus Features, 10.23) will open the BFI London Film Festival in October, but does mean it won’t play Telluride and Toronto first? I wonder. Will it get the critics? It goes without saying that educated upmarket women will flock to the plexes when Suffragette opens in late October, but what about X-factor males and the general looking-for-emotion crowd?

Suffragette costars Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson and Romola Garai. Here’s the British AFI version, also posted today: