Boys Don't Cry, but the Audience Members Will

On the surface, 21-year-old Brandon Teena seems like the world's perfect guy. He's small but good-looking in the chiseled, square-jawed, classically handsome sense. He's friendly and genuinely kind, a welcome change from the stereotypical rednecks he pals around with in Falls City, Nebraska. He knows how to treat a woman - just ask the girls who can't seem to resist his charms no matter where he goes.

There's just one hitch to his apparent perfection: he's actually a she.

Boys Don't Cry tells the true story of Teena Brandon, a transsexual young woman who lived as a man without having a sex-change operation. Brandon was brutally raped and murdered by so-called "friends" John Lotter and Tom Nissen in December of 1993.

Sponsored by Oberlin's Sexual Assault Support Team (SAST), the independent movie was screened in a packed King 306 Wednesday night to promote Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

The film takes a candid and graphic look at the pain of concealing one's identity from a world that would largely condemn the truth. From the outset, Boys depicts Brandon's "sexual identity crisis" as revolving around an issue entirely separate from homosexuality. "I'm not a dyke," Brandon tells a friend early in the movie.

He isn't content to live as a lesbian or to identify himself as such. Rather, he feels he's a man trapped in a woman's body, a concept neither his relatives nor his friends fully seem to grasp. "I don't even want it in my house," a former friend says of Brandon on discovering the truth about his identity. The film makes it clear that such ignorant, narrow-minded hatred directly led to Brandon's murder.

For the most part staying faithful to the facts, writer-director Kimberly Pierce takes audience members on an emotionally wrenching journey through the final year of Brandon's life in Boys. Leaving his native Lincoln, Nebraska for the first time in his life after a girlfriend discovers his true sex, Brandon (Hilary Swank in a performance of a lifetime) finds himself in tiny Falls City. There he develops a friendship and eventually fatal love triangle with ex-convict Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) and his beautiful girlfriend, Lana Tisdel (a well-cast Chloe Sevigny).

Swank, who deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for this role, shines in her poignant, almost understated portrayal of Brandon's efforts to live his life on his own gender-bending terms. Swank's androgynous appearance and convincing mannerisms make it tempting to forget that she is anything other than Brandon Teena, the "little buddy" who tries to fit in with uber-males Lotter and Nissen (Brendan Sexton III).

Yet the movie never allows its audience to forget Brandon's struggle: instead it confronts one with the day-to-day frustrations accompanying Brandon's attempts to reconcile the dual sides of his nature.

As Brandon Teena, he becomes one of the guys in the most stereotypical sense: he gets into fist-fights over women, allows himself to be dragged along the ground by a moving pick-up truck and initiates a high-speed car-chase. When he's alone, however, he must deal with the realities of having been born Teena Brandon.

He shamefacedly binds his chest down and stuffs his underwear each morning. He hides his tampon wrappers lest his housemates should see them in his garbage can and begin to wonder. Menstruation becomes for him a revolting symbol of his body's betrayal.

His two worlds collide in his complicated relationship with Lana, whose unhappy home life suggests that she is somewhat of a lost soul in her own right. Brandon is torn between wanting to hide his identity from her - he always keeps his clothes on when they're together to prevent her from discovering the truth - and wanting her to accept him for who he really is.

The Academy Award-nominated Sevigny deftly brings Lana to life, balancing her naiveté, insecurity and genuine love of Brandon with mostly believable results. Occasionally one can't help but wonder how Brandon manages to fool Lana for as long as he does; at one point she catches a glimpse of Brandon's bound cleavage but doesn't seem to think anything of it. For the most part, however, Lana is a credible character, and the chemistry between Swank and Sevigny is endearing and powerful.

Many audience members know in advance how Boys ends because of the real-life headlines that spawned it, but it's easy to hope against hope that on film Brandon and Lana miraculously will have a happy ending instead.

In fact, it is often easy to forget that Boys is based on a true story at all; nobody wants to believe that such a profoundly disturbing finale could stem from fact. The end credits, however, offer the sobering reminder that Nissen is serving a life-sentence and Lotter is currently appealing his first-degree murder conviction from death row. Boys Don't Cry compels its audience to remember that both Brandon Teena and the "sexual identity crisis" with which he dealt were real.