Boys Don't Cry

Boys Don’t Cry is a painful, persuasive love story, and Kimberly Peirce is right to put the attraction between Brandon and Lana at its centre. The true-story basis could have encouraged a film that explained its subject before allowing us to know him. Peirce and co-writer Andy Bienen give Brandon the ordinary wish to be wanted, and the romance becomes compelling because we understand that wish without needing an introduction. The crime drama grows out of our concern for him. We recommend it, with a serious warning about the brutality.

Hilary Swank’s Brandon is the main reason that approach works. There is eagerness in the performance, but also the effort of judging how much of himself he can safely offer to other people. Swank makes that calculation exhausting to watch without turning Brandon into someone whose only purpose is to suffer. We stay interested in what he wants from Lana, and the performance remains alive to the pleasure of being desired.

Chloë Sevigny gives Lana an uncertainty that makes the relationship feel less written in advance. She does not explain every response, and her reserve encourages us to look harder rather than assume that Brandon is the only complicated person here. We were moved by the quiet attention she gives him. Swank’s eagerness meets Sevigny’s watchfulness, and for a while we can share the hope that being together might be enough. Their attraction is convincing without either actor having to insist on it.

Jim Denault’s cinematography allows some tenderness into the rural Nebraska setting, which would feel intolerably narrow if it existed only to threaten Brandon. His treatment of the lovers makes the possibility of happiness there believable. Michael Shaw’s production design is convincing in its ordinariness, avoiding the sense that the surroundings have been assembled to make a case against everyone who lives there. These are useful choices in a crime drama whose people could so easily be reduced to examples of cruelty or courage.

Editors Tracy Granger and Lee Percy preserve the space the central performances need, and the relationship benefits from our having time to read a response. The film is less persuasive when it has to make the people around Brandon and Lana equally substantial. Peter Sarsgaard’s John Lotter and Brendan Sexton III’s Tom Nissen belong to a surrounding cast whose backgrounds feel too thinly drawn. Peirce and Bienen ask the actors to supply distinctions that the writing has not always made.

Nathan Larson’s music supports the romance, though we get more from the uncertainty in Sevigny’s face than from the score. Peirce is strongest when she trusts that uncertainty and lets us feel affection and apprehension together. The film’s severity can become oppressive, and its determination to confront cruelty sometimes threatens to leave us with nothing else to think about. That is a limitation for a drama whose central performance has made us care about far more than what might be done to Brandon.

The 18 certificate deserves to be taken seriously, and we would not suggest this as a casual choice for a shared evening. Its tenderness makes the distress harder to put aside. See it for Swank and Sevigny, but leave room for some quiet afterwards.