Boys Don't Cry (1999)

Another IMDB Top 250 film from the 2001 Edition that I was able to find in HD. It has been on the Bubbling Under list, which is the 251-500 on imdb. So he has been hovering outside of the top 250 for quite a while, so I wanted to check it out. I really thought this was some sort of lesbian romance film, so I wasn't really looking forward to it, I was pretty much wrong.

The film is based on a true story, and thanks to some message board links on imdb I saw some profile pictures of the real people behind these characters, and I have to say they are a little scary. Hilary Swank plays Brandon, a young man with a sexual identity crisis. Brandon has girl parts and hopes to eventually get an operation to become a man. He has been in trouble for using a fake drivers license and skips a court date after spending some time in a small town in Nebraska. He makes some friends at a bar and falls in love with Lana [Chloë Sevigny]. Lana's mother's friend John Lotter [Peter Sarsgaard] is much older than Lana but has always had a thing for her, he is very leery of Brandon and you get the feeling that this is becoming a dangerous situation.

Peter makes John Lotter a much more handsome man than he is in real life, I think Kimberly Peirce should have cast someone a little more scary in this role, but I don't want to take anything away from Peter's excellent performance. Swank won her first Oscar for this film, and she definitely deserved it. This one is definitely worth checking out.

Vote: 8/10

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171804/

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