Boys Don't Cry

* * * *

Cast: Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Brendan Sexton

Director: Kimberly Peirce

Rating: R18 (sexual violence, drug use)

Review:Russell Baillie

Running Time: 114 mins
Opens: Now showing Village Queen St, Rialto


Viewed solely as the anatomy of a triple murder in the American hinterland, Boys Don't Cry would still be a fine film.

But it's not just that. It's the true story of Brandon Teena who, born Teena Brandon, presented herself as a himself in the unforgiving blue-collar backwoods of Nebraska, but who was murdered along with two others in 1993.

The story made it to screen before in the 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story, which screened at local festivals and now deserves a television broadcast considering the interest generated by this Oscar-nominated dramatisation But both debut director Peirce and the mesmerising portrayal by the toothy Swank (a Karate Kid sequel and 90210 alumni) are clearly attempting to define what made Brandon/Teena tick. Or why Teena attempted to define herself as a guy's guy, a dreamy misfit with a cowboy swagger. And how she only became the true victim of her sexual identity crisis when those she had befriended couldn't cope with the truth.

Much of Peirce's film is set in a netherworld of roadhouses, trucks and trailerparks, her eye for the landscape just occasional visual flourishes sometimes reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.

There, Brandon arrives from out of town into a group of friends already living lives of quiet desperation and falls for the doe-eyed Lana (Sevigny, who like Swank is Oscar-nominated for her performance).

Together they make one of the big screen's sexier couples of recent times, a static charge palpable in the air between them.

But the rest of the circle of friends that Brandon has drifted into, headed by the powder-keg pair of John (Sarsgsard) and Tom (Sexton), prove as menacing as they are initially welcoming. And if the coming nightmare arrives as no surprise it doesn't stop it being any less harrowing. Boys Don't Cry is an intense film, made all the more gripping by its central performances and all-too-convincing depiction of those bits of America even America would rather forget about.