“When I read about Brandon,” the fiercely focused 32-year-old Peirce recalls, “I felt an immediate kinship. I was overwhelmed by the power of his desire to change himself into his fantasy of a boy. The absolute daring and courage to go and pull it off. So I thought it was my job to bring Brandon back to life and make sense of it for everybody.”
Peirce, who made a short film about Brandon as her graduate thesis at Columbia University, wanted to tell the tale as a tragic love story–an updated “Romeo and Juliet.” But she knew that her film could be only as good as the actress who played Brandon. The audience had to believe that this girl could pass. On top of that, Peirce wanted us to fall in love with this brave, confused, uneducated girl/boy–much as she had.
Mission spectacularly accomplished. This taut, sure-footed first film (acclaimed at festivals in Venice, Toronto and New York, it opens in New York Oct. 8) sidesteps sensationalism without sacrificing any of the story’s wonder and horror. And in Hilary Swank, whose biggest claim to fame had been her role in “Beverly Hills 90210,” Peirce’s three-year search for the perfect Brandon paid off big time. Swank is touching, beguiling and androgynously beautiful. Her chiseled face breaking out in a boyish grin, she conveys the raw delight of someone who is acting out one’s dream version of oneself. Peirce doesn’t shy away from Brandon’s sociopathic side–he stole cars, used stolen credit cards, all in the service of his fantasy life–but it’s easy to see why the women he dated fell for him.
As Lana, the gender-bending Romeo’s Juliet, Chloe Sevigny has a pathos of her own. Sevigny, with her slow, lazy sexuality, makes this blowsy small-town girl oddly valiant. No less striking are Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III as the deeply scary killers and Jeanetta Arnette as Lana’s hard-drinking, fiercely protective mother. These people first take the polite, pretty young man into their family, and for a brief, deluded moment Brandon’s fantasy of a normal life as a Midwestern boy is complete. Then in swift, savage strokes, Peirce shows us a body and a spirit broken, a life snuffed out. It’s an agonizing sight (and one that can’t help recall Matthew Shepard’s death in Wyoming). “Boys Don’t Cry” invests it with a tragic force that is honestly earned.
