This review contains some Spoilers!

Films should transport you. They should take you to another time. They should put you in another skin. "Boys Don't Cry" does more than this. It not only put me in the body of a woman, it put me in the body of a woman with gender identity confusion. It opened my eyes to this whole new world.

And, of course, that's saying a lot, considering I am a gay man. But gender identity issues have always seemed alien to me. I've never understood them. I never felt like a "woman trapped in a man's body." I'm just gay. I like being a man and I like being a man who likes other men. But being sensitive to gay "political" issues often means being sensitive to lesbians, transexuals, transgenderals, and transvestites, among other lesser thought-of groups. These are issues I know absolutely nothing about, really. And even though I believe in them fully, I never really understood them. That all changed with "Boys Don't Cry." We're so lucky to have this film.

The piece concerns a woman who dresses, acts and thinks like a man. She considers herself a man. And, through the evolution of the film, like the other characters in the film, we grow to consider her a man as well, even when confronted bluntly with her gender.

The film, as most people know, ends badly. We know it ends in a rape and murder. I don't even know how I know this. Perhaps the trailers alluded to it. Regardless, the film winds ever so slowly to it's obvious and eventual conclusion sometimes asking as many questions as it answers. We know what is going to come and yet when it does, it is sickening, heartbreaking, confounding and disenchanting. We hate it. But, suddenly, it is not the gender confused woman/girl we don't understand up there, on the screen. No, she seems so clear to us. It is the heartless and pointless act of violence against him/her that seems so confusing, so completely wrong, so beyond comprehension.

This sway in emotion and thought is brought forth with some of the most consummate acting you will ever see. Hilary Swank is nothing short of extraordinary as Brandon/Teena. It's an amazing performance. Somehow through all her posturing, she becomes a fully realized character. We know and understand her. And even though we know she has emotional conflicts and problems that she desperately needs to address, we still like her. We see the hope of her. We see the promise she brings.We want to hold her, embrace her, help her. Find shelter for her from the storm. And we almost have our prayers answered in Lana.

Chloe Sevigny plays Lana with the essence of a dream girl in the throws of her own identity crisis. She is adrift in a sea of white trash existence. She is squelching her dreams in drugs and alcohol. When she hooks up with Brandon, we see the hope of love, the promise of well-being. We touch it and taste it. And it comes so close to fulfilling all we dream. Sevigny is, as always, wonderful. As in almost every film where she appears, she is hope and innocence personified by a truth in flesh - a truth which is just as hurt and in trouble as the main character is, as we all are. It's wonderfully bittersweet and oh so close to heaven.

On the other end of the spectrum, Peter Sarsgaard and BrendanSexton III given fully realized performances as the victimizers, the rapists, and killers. They are not one-dimensional. They are not just homophobes or cretins or pure evil. Their actions and dialogue during the crimes are incomprehensible, much like the reality of the tale itself. It just makes it all the more disquieting and troubling and distasteful and harsh. One of the most strange and ungraspable things in the film comes in their treatment of Teena during and after the rape. Calling her "dude" and"little buddy" while they sexually victimize and brutalize her and after this happens as well is the whole crux of the idea of the film. They treat her as a man in many ways, while they force themselves upon her (hetero)sexually. It's blurred. It's bewildering. It's truth. Blatant truth.

Director Kimberly Peirce, who co-wrote the script, does an adequate job for her first time out. Her film may become too cinematic at times, with too much of that time-lapse-of-taillights-on-a-highway imagery involved, but the performances she gets out of her cast more than make up for any misplaced film school artiness. Peirce trusts her actors and is rewarded with some of the finest performances to grace the screen in aeons.

Too often when I talk about gay films, I accuse them of "preaching to the choir." That is, they plead for tolerance and acceptance but their pleas are only heard by gay people, the ones who are doing all the asking for acceptance in the first place. Straight people just don't go to see gay films, by and large. And so their messages are often lost or, at best, misplaced. But with "Boys Don't Cry," the message of tolerance and understanding is pleaded to a group that should already know better. Thanks to Peirce and Swank and Sevigny and the rest of the cast here, we finally hear the plea; We finally understand what it means. Sometimes the choir needs the sermon as much, if not more, than the congregation.

I am a better person for having seen this film.

Notes:

Also with Alicia Goranson (better known as Lecy Goranson ofTV's "Roseanne") and Jeanetta Arnette.

The film's working title was "Take it Like a Man." It was a wise choice to change this.

Producer Christine Vachon says that the police interrogation of Brandon, which sounds almost poorly scripted absurdity in the film, is taken verbatim from the police tapes on file.

The film, and in particular Swank and Sevigny, have been nominated for and won several awards.

A documentary called "The Brandon Teena Story" preceded the film in 1998.

Filmed in Texas, although it's set in the Midwest.

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