Resurrection

She has a canny eye for the lurid, but not a corrupt one. The rape and murder scenes of Boys Don’t Cry, though trimmed to escape an NC-17, remain harrowing enough to disturb your sleep, as well they should. Though the movie is styled after the small-town film noir favored by young independent filmmakers, it‘s free of the disclaiming jokey sneer that defaces so much of contemporary neo-noir. Shot by Jim Denault with the grungy lyricism he perfected for Michael Almereyda’s lovely Nadja and Kelly Reichardt‘s River of Grass, almost all the film’s action takes place at night in the cramped, tawdry houses inhabited by Teena‘s lumpen coterie. Yet the predominant tone is pensive, even wistful, allowing Peirce to slip the restraints of smug tabloid sociology -- lesbian! thief! hate-crime victim! -- and individualize this deluded naif who imagined that charm and forthcoming surgery were all it would take to persuade the world to accept him.

And what charm he has, in the quietly controlled presence of Hilary Swank, late of Beverly Hills 90210 and The Next Karate Kid. Unable to rely on the visual splash of male-to-female cross-dressing, Swank, her long blond hair cut short and dyed a nondescript brown, plays Teena as a beguiling lad with eager-to-please eyes and the barest hint of the Lothario about him. Teena lacked both the rhetoric and the support of a metropolitan transgendered community to sustain him: All this young provincial knew was that he wanted to live as a man and make love to women. Though Peirce doesn’t shrink from Teena‘s checkered history with the law or his childhood in a decidedly illiberal environment, she doesn’t try to explain him away as a victim of lousy parenting. Among the crowd he falls in with, Teena stands out as the soul of sanity. Cast from the freakier edges of indie film -- Peter Sarsgaard is riveting as John Lotter, the loose cannon who eventually becomes Teena‘s persecutor -- Teena’s friends are as sorry a crew of drunks, dopeheads and self-mutilators as you could find this side of Larry Clark. Chloe Sevigny, a survivor of Clark‘s awful Kids, here achieves a ruined dignity as Lana, the girl with whom Teena falls in love. Their relationship, sustained even after Lana wakes up, after a fashion, to the fact that there’s no penis, raises the movie‘s most interesting question, which is not what made Teena who he was or whether he was gay, but how did he manage to hold on to the women he attracted long after it should have become obvious he lacked some crucial equipment? The stock answer offered in such accounts is that as a former woman, he’d know exactly what women want: attention, respect, flowers. Peirce persuasively sidesteps this rather flabby view of female sexuality -- for as many women as not, size matters more than sweet talk or even a slow hand -- by setting both Lana‘s love for Brandon, and the hatred he inspired in certain men, against the brutalizing conditions of life among the dispossessed of Falls City. For Lana, Peirce implies, he was a signpost to liberation. As for Brandon, his tragedy may have been to cut and run a mere 50 miles for freedom. Had he headed straight for San Francisco, he might be alive and blissfully hairy today.