‘Boy Erased’ Is a Powerful Showcase for Lucas Hedges and Nicole Kidman

There’s a question that often pops up when a movie like Boy Erased is made, and that question is “Who is this for?” Which can sound more loaded than it is. Intended audience can make a big difference, though. A movie like Green Book can be fully innocuous on its face, but it also feels like a movie about race relations made exclusively for white people’s benefit, and that makes it a little insidious. Boy Erased doesn’t feel insidious, but it definitely feels like the kind of movie that won’t as impactful for gay audiences — who still could see themselves in Lucas Hedges’ college boy who is sent to gay conversion camp after another boy exposes him at school — as much as it will for their parents. Or any parents. It seems strange to say that Boy Erased should be mandatory viewing for any parents with young children, but if that’s what it takes to pull back the curtain on the inhuman violations of gay conversion therapy, so be it.

Based on a memoir by Garrard Conley and directed by Joel Edgerton — the Australian actor/director who made the effectively sinister The Gift a few years ago — Boy Erased follows a young man named Jared (Lucas Hedges). Raised in an evangelical family, son of a Baptist preacher (Russell Crowe) and his warm but traditional wife (Nicole Kidman), Jared is the picture-perfect good son. The kid practically gets out of bed in a white button-down and khakis. You can see the modest and content family life this kid has all laid out in front of him. And then, shortly after he goes away to college, he’s exposed for a gay encounter, the circumstances of which are more complicated than Jared wants to admit or that his parents want to know. And in that spirit of defiant ignorance and fear, the wisdom of Jared’s father and his church community sends this boy to a nearby conversion camp.

None of the above happens in a linear fashion in the movie. We start out with Jared and his mom arriving to check him in to “Love in Action,” an ex-gay ministry run by Victor Sykes (played by Edgerton himself). All the events that brought Jared here are presented in flashback, as he begins the work of dismantling his own same-sex attractions. For gay audiences and (most? many?) straight allies, the insidiousness of Love in Action is obvious on its face, and Edgerton’s direction drives hard in that direction. The monochromatic tones of the camp wash out all color and personality from the gathered participants (an ensemble that includes celebrated filmmaker Xavier Dolan and pop star Troye Sivan, both gay performers). But it goes deeper than that. The insidiousness of these camps — which pass themselves off as “therapy” or “ministries” — using the language of counseling or support groups in order to emotionally terrorize gay youth is chilling. The scrutiny that these kids are placed under for the most mundane details of how they present and carry themselves in the world, down to the way they stand when at rest, should be a familiar (if concentrated) concept for most gay audiences.

Boy Erased moves in two directions at this point: what’s happening at the conversion camp and what’s happening when Jared returns at night to the hotel where he and his mom are staying (his father is back home, doing his best to present a holy Christian front). Kidman and Hedges really shine in these scenes; she in particular carries the ever-so-slowly cracking confidence of a woman who’s never before had to question the inherent rightness of her every thought and action. When Jared comes back with a homework assignment one night, an inventory of his family tree for sinful behavior like drug addiction, gambling, or same-sex attractions, his mom parries it off with the kind of good humor that feels genuinely comforting. When she starts to get real and mentions to Jared that he has an uncle whom they never see who was “feminine” and moved away to Louisiana, it feels like she’s considering the implications of this all for the first time.

Lucas Hedges, meanwhile, is one of the brightest lights of his generation. He was rightly recognized with an Oscar nomination for his work as a grieving, overcompensating son in Manchester by the Sea, and if you ask me, he put in Oscar-worthy work again as a closeted high-school kid in last year’s Lady Bird. He’s tremendously empathetic in Boy Erased, even if the script sometimes insists on doing a lot of the work for him. He shares some dynamite scenes with both Kidman and Crowe. But it’s one scene nestled in the middle of the film — a flashback to a night Jared spent with an art student he met at school, and a night when the beautiful possibilities of opening himself up to these feelings he’s been so afraid of — where he does his most achingly wonderful work. If there’s one scene in this movie that feels tailored to the film’s gay audience foremost, it’s this one.

If you call a movie like Boy Erased “important,” you make it feel like homework. Or like it’s looking for a pat on the back. That’s been true of many “issue” films and more than a few movies made by straight people about the gay experience. Neither feels true of Boy Erased. It’s importance lies in allowing the experiences of a gay character, the complexity of his hopes and fears and betrayals and hard-won victories, to be communicated to an audience that deeply needs to know them. As long as ex-gay “therapy” and conversion camps exist, there’s work that needs to be done. Boy Erased, beautiful and empathetic as it is, is a part of that work. That utility can keep it more pedestrian than other movies that take the gay experience and run with it. But that utility should not allow this movie to be swept aside.

Where to stream 'Boy Erased'