Butler's Cinema Scene

“BEACH RATS”  My rating: B

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Thirty years ago a film dealing with the subject matter of “Beach Rats” would have been labeled a “gay” film and aimed specifically at audiences looking for  a satisfying coming out story.

Well, that was then.

Eliza Hittman’s second feature (after “It Felt Like Love”) is about a young man who is probably gay, but it’s less obsessed with his sexuality than with his general cluelessness.

Frankie (Brit actor Harris Dickinson) lives in Brooklyn with his mother, younger sister and soon-to-be-dead cancer-riddled father. He’s out of school and jobless, and spends his summer hanging out on the beach with a few of his childhood friends, know-nothings whose world view is limited to vaping and the availability of pot and pussy.

Frankie has a secret. He’s been visiting online gay chatrooms, tentatively exploring the possibilities. Every now and then he’ll arrange for a tryst with one of these men, who are clearly smitten with Frankie’s body and all-American good looks.

Writer/director Hittman takes it for granted that Frankie’s gay.  But like a lot of young people he’s not sure what he is.

Early in the film he’s picked up by a local girl, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), who spots him at a Coney Island fireworks display and zooms in.  Frankie begs off that he’s too tired to have sex, but over several weeks he and Simone will get intimate.   It’s hard to say whether he enjoys the sex or simply views it as good camouflage, throwing off any friends or family members who suspect he swings another way.

If our protagonist were, say, a middle-class suburbanite, he’d probably find himself in an LGBT teen support group.  But Frankie’s living in a macho-drenched working-class corner of Brooklyn. About all he knows about being gay is that it’s majorly uncool with his vaguely criminal buds.

Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein

Your classic coming-out movie usually ends on a positive note. But “Beach Rats” doesn’t give its leading man a hopeful, upbeat sendoff. At film’s end Frankie is as confused, ashamed and conflicted as he was when we met him.

From a strictly dramatic point of view, this is a hard sell. Happily, Hittman has in Dickinson a charismatic leading man who so effortlessly soaks up our attention that we can overlook — well, almost — his narrow, smothering mindset.

And the film has been shot and edited in such a way that it feels practically documentary. So palpable is the atmosphere captured in Helene Louvart’s 16mm cinematography that it compensates for a plot that pretty much ends where it began.

| Robert W. Butler