Scott B

Harris Dickinson's performance as Frankie, the closeted small-time crook at the center of this movie, is incredible. I wish the movie had as much to say as his handsome face does, at various times extremely pained, intermittently excited, falsely confident and consistently confused. I get that this film is more a character study than anything else, but it's difficult to fully get to know the guy when you don't see how much of anything he does plays out nor how he reacts/responds/handles it all. Outside of his "girlfriend" breaking up with him, every loose thread of the film remains hanging...every question unanswered. That leaves us with a more simplistic and familiar person -- one too encumbered by the pressures of his social world to come of out of the shadows...a theme that becomes quite literal when he hides in dark rooms while chatting on a hook-up site with older men who ask him to turn on a light so they can see him. There was a glimpse of real depth in one sexual interlude when he seems to really go for it rather than passively get off, and the intimacy they share after sex seemed to promise some clarity on who he really is and who he's becoming that unfortunately the movie never really delivers. Frankie simply just ambles out of each scenario...we are treated only to his visceral reactions in the moment but not to how any of those moments fundamentally affect or change him. There's a lot of lingering focus on Dickinson's body but less so on what's really going on beneath the surface, leaving the audience like so many of his online suitors...in the dark hoping for a little light.