Watching it, you have to wonder if someone during the movie’s story conferences didn’t say, “Hey, do we really have to focus the narrative on an impossibly good-looking Midwestern farm boy who comes to New York and gets swept up in the Greenwich Village gay scene? Wasn’t that done in a film called ‘Stonewall’ 20 years ago?”
Indeed it was, and two decades on, the idea is well past its expiration date. Here, the kid’s name is Danny (Jeremy Irvine), and throughout the film we get flashbacks to the troubles back home in Indiana that drove him to New York. His dad (David Cubitt) is a stern, crew-cut high school coach who suspects his son of “deviant” tendencies, even though Danny plays football and appears straight as an arrow. Caught hooking up with the hunky guy (Karl Glusman) he’s in love with, the high school senior becomes a laughingstock at school and a pariah at home. With a mom (Veronika Veradskaya) who can do nothing but wring her hands and a little sister (Joey King) who adores him no matter what, Danny realizes he’s in an impossible situation, so he hops a Greyhound to the Big Apple.
First stop once he’s there is the gay nucleus of Greenwich Village, which includes the scuzzy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn, the only gay bar in the city that allows dancing. Here it must be noted that the film’s one area of unqualified triumph lies in the collaboration of production designer Michèle Laliberté and cinematographer Markus Förderer. Built on a soundstage in Montreal, the film’s sets—especially the gargantuan Sheridan Square re-creation—are atmospheric, impeccably executed and contribute greatly to the movie’s overall visual panache.
Since he arrives in New York bearing a scholarship to Columbia University, Danny, in addition to looking like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, is a veritable icon of white privilege next to the motley crew of gay street kids he falls in with. These include a sassy young transvestite named Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), who serves as the newcomer’s Virgil while also, of course, developing an unrequited crush on him.
As the film reminds us at every turn, these were hard times for members of the gay community. Homosexuality was illegal in much of the country and stigmatized everywhere; gays were persecuted by the government and regularly attacked by police; “out” gay culture simply didn’t exist. But there were stirrings of the political changes to come. At Stonewall one night, Danny’s asked to dance by Trevor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a darkly handsome activist who invites him to a gay rights meeting and, later, to live with him. Involving one of the lamest sex scenes in recent memory, the relationship between these two comes to an abrupt end when Danny sees Trevor dancing with another cute boy at Stonewall.
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