Boys Don't Cry

Cross-dressing has largely been a subject of humour in the movies, if at times of an erotic kind - Chaplin in Carmen, for instance, Dietrich in Morocco, Lemmon and Curtis in Some Like It Hot - and usually left to European directors. There are few mainstream precedents for its serious treatment in a lower-class milieu - off-hand only John Dexter's rarely screened 1972 I Want What I Want and Neil Jordan's The Crying Game come to mind.

So Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry, based quite closely on a real-life murder case of 1993, seems both brave and unusual. Looking like an attractive combination of Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, Hilary Swank plays Teena Brandon, a 20-year-old girl from a Nebraska trailer park who wishes to become a man.

She cuts off her hair, straps down her breasts, pads out her crotch and, equipped with false ID, goes to a roller-disco as Brandon Teena. The disguise works, though when her identity is twigged she's pursued back to the family trailer by angry boys, and warned by her brother of the dangers she's running. Paying no heed, she bumps into a single mother, Candace, in a bar, provokes a fight with a belligerent trucker, and is saved by Candace's roughneck friends, John and Tom.

She takes off with them for the run-down town of Falls City 75 miles away, where she's accepted for what she appears to be by the guys, and proves attractive to the girls. At a karaoke session in a garish bar, she's drawn to the sad teenage beauty, Lana (Chloë Sevigny), a factory worker with an alcoholic mother. Lana is part of a trio singing 'The Bluest Eyes of Texas' and Brandon is smitten. But it's another country song that comes to mind - 'Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places' - and that's precisely what Brandon is doing in wanting to be one of the boys in this rough macho world. Her criminal past and current offences - for forgery, auto theft and larceny - are bound to catch up with her and expose her deception.

It's possible that the women might react sympathetically and that Lana could agree with Joe E. Brown that 'nobody's perfect'. But John and Tom, a pair of criminal psychopaths reminiscent of Hickock and Smith in Capote's In Cold Blood, are likely to get lethally brutal when they're made to look foolish and have their own sexuality challenged.

The director uses the tiresome device of speeding up time, turning night traffic into a strip of yellow light and racing the clouds across the sky. But she's good, and unpatronising on the empty, desperate milieu, and the performance she gets from Hilary Swank deserved its Oscar. Swank's Brandon is notable for generosity, tenderness and consideration. No wonder the girls respond - there aren't many men like that in Falls City.