By Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post
Although many critics have called “Beach Rats” a coming-of-age tale, Eliza Hittman’s atmospheric verité drama about a gay Brooklyn teenager struggling to accept his homosexuality doesn’t actually come to much of anything, let alone the incipient wisdom, knowledge or — at a bare minimum — understanding that usually accompany such journeys. Rather, this very thinly sliced character study of beautiful if benighted adolescence is more a pre-coming-of-age tale, one that takes us close to, but not through, the transformative acquisition of good judgment.
It ends, in other words, not in a state of enlightenment, but in sheer panic.
In that sense, it’s probably far more raw and real — in the most unsettling sense of both words — than many movies about kids who, although they have the bodies of grown-ups, still have the brains of children.
Twenty-year-old British newcomer Harris Dickinson plays Frankie, a sensitive, model-handsome teen who spends his summer days getting high in Coney Island with three undeserving mook pals — all of them sexist, homophobic and slightly dumber than he — whom he pointedly refuses to call “friends.” Weed and OxyContin, not camaraderie and handball, are the common bonds of these titular denizens of the boardwalk. As for Frankie’s nights, those are spent trolling online gay hookup sites, where he briefly chats with older men, and then meets them for furtive, anonymous sex.
This routine is disrupted by the appearance of Simone (Madeline Weinstein), a flirty teenage girl who first comes on to – and then comes home with – Frankie. Although he drives her away when his inability to maintain arousal turns into misplaced hostility, he’s enough of a gentleman to apologize later. They both decide to give the relationship a second chance, even though he really isn’t interested in her.
This is obvious to all but Frankie, who repeatedly states, “I don’t know what I like.” He’s not just talking about sex here, but life. Frankie is aimless, jobless and, to a large degree, hopeless: tortured both by a mother (Kate Hodge) whose efforts to express concern come off to her son as prying, and an invalid father (Neal Huff) who is slowly dying of cancer. If Hittman is trying to avoid such cliches as the weak/absent father and domineering mother in this otherwise nuanced portrait of gay awakening, she hasn’t succeeded. It also is something of a mystery how Frankie, who looks like he stepped out of a Bruce Weber ad for Abercrombie & Fitch, is just now becoming aware of the effect he has on men and women.
Maybe he’s just had a growth spurt?
Frankie’s clumsy efforts to juggle his various addictions and obligations — to weed, to older men, to his non-friends and to Simone — set him on a path toward a dangerous reckoning with himself and who he will become. Although Hittman’s often bold and occasionally uncomfortably honest movie takes us up to the threshold of that accounting, it doesn’t have the nerve to cross it.
“Beach Rats”
Two stars.
Rated R.
98 minutes.
