Boys Don't Cry: A

Boys Don't Cry is a wonder of filmmaking. It is a true-life romance with Hilary Swank as its show-stopping soul. It is a whirling showcase for writer-director Kimberly Pierce's, here making her debut film, immense talent. And finally it is simply a plain-spoken story told with naturalistic emotional beauty. There is something implicitly unique to Boys Don't Cry, something that sticks with you long after the lights have gone up, that allows it to transcend the boundaries of "tragedy" or "bio-pic" and rise to become, simply, a dazzling film.

Its singular startling gift is in its emotional intensity, its capacity to lyricize the most sacred of
emotions without once over-blowing them. It is a testament to the school of thought that speaking about the truest of things - in this case that ever-constant search for love - is usually always best. There are no cleverly structured plot-pieces, nor no momentum-stopping soliloquies. There is simply a person perched in an Eden of their own discovery from which they are destined to fall. The way with which Pierce documents this, in a shocking feat of near verite camera-work, will steal your breath away.

The film starts with Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank) stripping down, her hair and her clothes, into a rougher and cleaner look - into the look of a boy. She heads out early to a local hang-out and easily swoons the girls. By the time she has made physical contact with them however she is no longer Teena Brandon, she is Brandon Teena - a roughneck twenty-something who eventually makes his way to Falls City, Nebraska where the "she" becomes, for all intents and purposes, a "he".

Brandon falls into a roughly hewn band of blue-collars. There are John (Peter Sarsgaard), Tom (Brendan Sexton III), Candice (Alicia Goranson) and Candice's friend Lana (Chloe Sevigny). Their merry band whittle their hours away drinking, rough-housing, and trying - as all small-town residents do - to inflate their own existence...or to escape it. It is a ironic fact that Brandon - a person for whom escape has already been achieved - comes to hang around such isolated souls but when they all get together, in say Lana's living room or around the local water tower, their eccentric charms are hard to resist. Thus Brandon sticks around with these people; taking his cues of masculinity from John and quickly becoming smitten with Lana. Soon enough he is one of the "family".

Happy as he is though, in a newly discovered world of bliss, Brandon's love affair - with Lana, with her family, with her friends, with his own new identity - cannot last. The minute he has achieved his greatest moment in Falls City, all I will say is that the police and a healthy dose of fog are involved, is the exact moment when everything starts falling apart. The end result is not pretty.

To anyone who read the news in 1993, the year the actual Teena Brandon suffered her sad fate, the tragic climax will come as no surprise. The real surprise is the amount of emotional clarity that is brought into handling the material, as well as the maturity.

Chloe Sevigny is a revelation as Lana and her sad, quiet eyes practically gather the audience into collective empathy. And Hilary Swank works with such awe-inspiring skill as to finally burst forth from that alien label "sexual identity crisis" and simply become, in all its heartbreaking glory, a human being. Still it is Kimberly Pierce who is the true star of the show. She has worked a true miracle with Boys Don't Cry: she leaps daintily over cliches, dodges melodrama effortlessly, and sails magnificently into the land of great film with a purity and force that is in of itself a rewarding experience to watch.