Adolescent confusion gets the movie it deserves with Giant Little Ones

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      Starring Josh Wiggins and Darren Mann. Rated 14A

      A bright cast hits all the right notes in a drama that probably couldn’t have been timed better.

      Life is fairly bucolic for best friends Franky (Josh Wiggins, Mean Dreams) and Ballas (Darren Mann, Hello Destroyer), swim-team stars who have both arrived at their midteens with a better-than-average social credit score. When we first meet him on the eve of his 17th birthday, Franky is negotiating the end of his virginity with girlfriend Priscilla (Hailey Kittle, TV’s Falling Water). The more experienced Ballas has lots of advice for his pal (his birthday present to Franky is a flare gun, ahem), and it’s that overdetermined projection of virility that goes nuclear when a drunk night ends with a brief sexual encounter between the two boys.

      Returning to the big screen 17 years on from his fine debut, Flower & Garnet, writer-director Keith Behrman wisely occludes certain details of the event, but it’s not as straightforward as the fallout suggests. Ballas takes refuge in his macho posturing and swiftly PRs Franky into the role of “fag”. And the entire school already knows that Franky’s dad (Kyle MacLachlan) recently shacked up with his new boyfriend. Meanwhile, Ballas’s sister Natasha (Taylor Hickson, Deadpool) gets a bead on Franky. She’s a misfit who turns up at school every day to see the word slut graffiti’d onto her locker. Can you guess where this is going?

      The point being made here, beyond a genuinely harrowing depiction of friendship on the rocks, is that nobody in Giant Little Ones is remotely certain of their sexuality. It’s all so beautifully executed that we can forgive certain narrative conveniences like the saintliness of Franky’s parents. More vexing, perhaps, is a pristine middle-class backdrop that’s more nostalgic wish fulfillment than real. The kids love their identity politics, fair enough, and here’s an excellent movie levelling a decisive blow against small-mindedness. But grouchy old Marxists will still wonder why we talk so much about the symptoms, while airbrushing out the disease.

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