Boys Don't Cry (1999)

Boys Don't Cry, the misguided debut feature from Kimberly Peirce, resulted from Peirce's graduate thesis project and has all the intrinsic, dutiful appeal of a research paper. This true story chronicles the rise and fall of Brandon Teena (born Teena Brandon), a boy born into a girl's body. We never really meet Teena, though, joining the story as this Nebraskan teen, disguised as a boy, infiltrates a volatile social circle that slowly, but surely, unravels. The story somberly and solidly plods, but the characters never take on the liveliness of real people, nor is the film expressionistic enough to encourage an audience's imaginative leap to the character's true natures. A newsmagazine would seemingly inform more (the most insightful comment offered about Teena by one of the characters: "There's just something about him"), and the tragic consequences of the story are so explicitly hammered at the audience that real feeling or thought become irrelevant.

Good intentions aside, the film is too opaque to make Teena understandable to the unenlightened. And what enlightened people would want to suffer through to the foregone conclusion that bigotry is bad? Hilary Swank is mostly credible as Teena, though the deficits of the script eventually leave her nothing but a series of tics to enact. Instead of crafting incisive dialogue, Peirce (whose background is in "experimental" film) steers the film straight into David Lynch's stylistic territory, leaning heavily on his iconography of lost highways and beautiful factories.