With “Boy Erased,” Lucas Hedges continues his run as Hollywood’s favorite emotionally tortured teen.
This time, in a story based on writer Garrard Conley’s memoir, Hedges plays a gay college freshman whose parents send him off to conversion therapy after learning of his proclivities. Making matters worse, his character Jared is the son of a small town Baptist pastor (Russell Crowe), who condemns homosexuality from the pulpit. So, Jared’s given an option: Change or hit the road.
Shocked, the poor guy agrees to go pray the gay away.
That sets up an affecting, not-quite-hard-hitting story that ultimately touches the heart.
Jared’s mom Nancy (Nicole Kidman) stays with him at a hotel while he attends his messed-up classes. At the facility, he catalogs his family’s list of sins — options amusingly include joining a gang and alcoholism — and pretends an empty chair is his father while having fake confrontations with it. The student guidebook is hilariously rife with typos, in one place saying “Dog” instead of “God.” Jared soon realizes he’s entrusted his well-being to borderline-illiterate idiots.
Nancy wrestles with this obvious truth, too, and a fraying Kidman turns the distraught mom into a soft-spoken Tammy Faye Bakker type. She’s even got the hairstyle!
Not every scene takes place in the uncomfortable church-rec-center combo. The movie jumps back and forth in time, and we witness some of Jared’s college experiences.
What’s most grounded about his story is that he doesn’t arrive at his university belting out Madonna and rocking a rainbow tank top. Jared doesn’t even come out of the closet there. His defining moments with men are vague and sometimes painful and traumatizing. There is a late-night dorm room scene that will be tough for some viewers to watch.
Back at camp, Jared and his fellow students — one is played by Troye Sivan, who can’t quite dull his pop-star sheen — endure psychological torments from the group’s leader played by Joel Edgerton (also the film’s director and screenwriter). An exercise in which a boy is beaten with Bibles is appalling.
The talented Hedges, like he did as an orphaned teen in “Manchester by the Sea,” fights the urge to twist and shout all the way through the movie, and instead lets emotion burst forth at unexpected moments. In one powerful scene, he makes a bus stop advertisement feel his wrath. Still, the steady-as-she-goes film could use even more angst.
“Boy Erased” is the second gay conversion therapy movie of the year, after “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” Both are worthwhile. Where “Cameron” was an intimate charmer focused on the importance of camaraderie to get through hard times, the more dramatic “Boy Erased” is about accepting our family for who they are, in whatever condition they arrive in.
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