Boys Don’t Cry

Out of the many controversies that have plagued the Academy Awards, one that has only recently started to get rectified is its glorification and seeming worship of transgender roles played by cisgendered individuals. While more of a larger issue with the industry than one specific to the show, it’s fascinating seeing the number of actors who have been nominated or even won for portraying a transgender individual when they are in fact not actually trans. While the most recent ceremony in 2025 did nominate its first trans actress in a major category and not all of these past performances are objectively awful by association, it’s an annoying trait that still hasn’t been entirely scrubbed out. While a lot of these performances and movies have been criticized by the LGBTQIA+ community, one that didn’t suffer their vitriol was the 1999 American biography, Boys Don’t Cry, which told the tragic story of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was raped and murdered in 1993.

In rural Nebraska, Brandon Teena (played by Hilary Swank) is a twenty-year-old transgender male who, despite never getting sex reassignment surgery, has lived as a man long enough to get a few girlfriends, even if he faces death threats when people learn of his true identity. While trying to evade a court summoning in regard to some past juvenile crimes, he befriends ex-convict John Lotter (played by Peter Sarsgaard) and gets acquainted with his group of friends, which includes 19-year-old, Lana Tisdel (played by Chloë Sevigny), whom Brandon quickly becomes attracted to. After spending a lot of time with this group and even getting into a relationship with Lana, Brandon’s fabricated past is quickly uncovered by Lana, who still seems willing to run away with him and start a new life away from the backwater existence she’s living now, but John and his bunch also learn the truth, which sets out off a chain of events that sadly won’t have a happy ending.

Released with the help of Fox Searchlight, Boys Don’t Cry was viewed as one of the best movies of 1999, earned three times its production budget back at the box office, was largely accepted by the LGBTQIA+ community for drawing more attention to Brandon’s story and rampant hate crime throughout America, and even won Hilary Swank her first Oscar. With gritty direction, gripping performances (especially from Swank and Sevigny), wonderfully intimate visuals, and an extremely intense atmosphere that preps the audience for trouble but also knows how to catch them off guard, this film effectively shines a spotlight on an extremely unpleasant true story

The movie was initially conceived not long after the actual murder when director Kimberly Pierce, while studying at Columbia University, became engrossed in Brandon’s case and dedicated the next five years to writing a screenplay for a film adaptation, eventually finding enough financial partners and willing producers to secure a $2 million dollar budget for the feature. With the aim of highlighting the entrancing aspects of Brandon’s personhood while also making sure not to ‘mythicize’’ his life, Pierce and fellow screenwriter, Andy Bienan, took elements from other pieces of media that told his story like the 1998 documentary, The Brandon Teena Story, and the 1996 Aphrodite Jone true crime book, All She Wanted, for reference, but specifically choose to focus on the short, tragic relationship between Brandon and Lana. While this story feels very well researched and does a good job keeping the audience engaged with very little in terms of conflict or narrative swerves, parts of this script could’ve been better tooled.

From a directing standpoint, Pierce does a great job portraying this story with enough authenticity and tact to feel believable, but also enough visual flair, dramatic edits and suspenseful sequences to feel like more than just a beat-for-beat reciting of true events. While flouring up such a tragic true story could feel disingenuous, the movie never once feels as such, and through good pacing, incredibly strong performances, striking visuals that make an otherwise barren and very immovable locale feel very raw, and a narrative that many compared to classic coming-of-age romantic dramas of Hollywood’s past like Rebel Without a Cause, it can stand as a flick with familiar traits, but one that’s still distinct and daring, with its brutal and uncensored portrayal of bigotry, trans bashing and rape permanently etching this tale into audience’s minds. With that said, while the direction is very good and the script does a nice enough job informing people of the events, leaving Brandon’s home life and early years out makes the movie feel like it’s missing its prologue, and therefore doesn’t feel fully complete. While it does tackle Brandon’s sexual identity crisis and the audience can identify with and feel sympathy for his situation, the movie’s fast dive into this star-crossed-lovers romance and its eventual fallout means that there’s not much time to unload the mountains worth of baggage this person had to deal with and ironically doesn’t feel as intimate as it should’ve.

One of the drawbacks to the common trope of cisgender actors portraying trans people is that it can feel put-on and like a ‘transformative experiment’’ in the vein of portraying a ‘’character’’ rather than a sexual or gender identity. Even the best actors can come across as manipulative and attention-hungry, but Hilary Swank does not suffer this issue while playing Brandon, probably because she was still a relative newcomer to Hollywood at the time she was cast. Going as far as to masquerade as a man in everyday life to prepare for the part, Swank’s Oscar-winning performance is still the most discussed aspect of this film, and it’s easy to see why as she does a great job making Brandon feel human, flawed and as defined as the script allows him to be. However, while doing a stellar job with the heartfelt and harrowing portions and sharing great chemistry with almost every actor, it feels like most of her performance is dedicated to making the audience believe she’s a boy rather than fleshing out Brandon as a character. It’s not entirely her fault as the script seems more interested in mapping out the events and broad details instead of the in-depth personal nuggets, but it means that Brandon comes across as a sympathetic figure rather than a really complicated individual despite having all the ingredients to make him so.

While Swank’s performance was the most applauded, the rest of the cast are also really good and bring a lot of grit and rawness to these clearly flawed individuals. Because most people know how this event is going to end, it doesn’t waste time trying to make the audience like these characters, but it still goes out of its way to make them feel like more than one-note tropes. This is best showcased with Peter Sarsgaard as John Lotter, as his erratic and constantly on-edge attitude that can quickly switch to a seemingly friendly demeanor makes him incredibly unpredictable, and with the overall atmosphere and the precarious situation Brandon is stepping into by associating with these clearly unhinged people, it makes everything very uneasy. While the rest of the group don’t have a ton of depth, Brendan Sexton III, Lecy Goranson, and Jeanette Arnette also feel elevated above what they arguably needed to be. Chloë Sevigny also received an Oscar nomination for her part as Lana, and she does a great job making her feel done-with-life, but those brief sparks of passion that shine when around Brandon results in some nice moments of chemistry, and she feels like one of the few roles that actually has some bite to it, so while not acknowledged as much as Swank, her performance is equally as impressive.

Given how the film looks, it’d be easy to see some of its visual decisions as a consequences of the smaller budget, but not only do most feel intentional due to how some shots are filmed and edited, but its specific portrayal brings such personality and active life to what could’ve been a plainly presented feature, that it was totally worth the atypical appearance. Going for more of a neorealist vibe, the way this movie manages to make its location look interesting without going full Hollywood is pretty clever, deciding to shoot everything in a close-quarters sense, with squalid and unhospitable environments matched with very dim lighting, which does a good job emulating the rural, backwater, even trailer-park attitude of this area of Nebraska, while also visually giving credence to the defeated attitude and rampant aggression every character exhibits (especially when it comes to Brandon’s mere existence). This also leads to some very memorable shots by Jim Denault which can switch from a trippy, almost psychedelic perspective that feels like something out of a music video, to more intimate moments that genuinely feel like you’re in the room with someone.

The natural lighting may feel like it’d hinder certain scenes, but none of the staging feels accidental or like something crucial is being covered up,  and whenever the characters are outside and the pitch blackness of the surrounding desert frontier is shown off, it really isolates the characters (especially Brandon) and further adds to the frightening atmosphere this location so naturally conveys, making everything feels unsafe and unsecure. The soundtrack has a lot of country, blues and rock type music that almost brings an independent feel to the picture, heightening the crazed and almost repressed energy of all the characters and really pushes forward that ”rebellious teen” energy this movie was hoping to convey in order to really normalize Brandon’s experience and make his eventual fate all the more undeserved and cruel.

Boys Don’t Cry may be another Oscar-winning film that tells the story of a transgender individual with a cisgender person, but unlike other examples where it feels like they’re doing it to get credit for taking on such a ‘bold’ and ‘risky’ role, this movie feels like it had the right intentions and even if not perfect, can stand proud for bringing more attention to a very horrific crime. The directing is authentic yet still dynamic, the performances are gritty and emotionally engaging (especially the two leads), the visuals are subdued but bring out the best of its setting, and the atmosphere is oppressive and bleak yet also strangely freeing at the same time. It could’ve used a bit more of Brandon’s backstory to make him feel more like a fleshed-out person, and because this was one of the first films to tackle transgenderism in a mainstream property, it does feel a little standardly portrayed, but considering it probably helped make future stories surrounding the topic more accessible, it was worth the baby step.