The film starts with us being introduced to Ponyboi, (who I first thought was trans female), who is a part time sex worker for New Jersey truck drivers and later arrives at the second job of laundromat. Ponyboi's best friend is the pregnant Angela, whose boyfriend Ninny also happens to be the pimp for Ponyboi (fucking them on the side). He is charming, sexy, alluring but also dangerous. It's valentines day and he asks Ponyboi to "tale care" of one of his clients with home cooked drugs. Things go wrong when this man dies because of drug. Ponyboi panics and run from the location taking all of this man's money. As expected, goons arrive looking for the dead man and catch Vinny, who now needs to look for Ponyboi. A cat and mouse game follows and various events happen over the course of night. Ponyboi meets a handsome country boy and a cowboy and gets immediately attracted to him and the man also shows keen interest in Ponyboi. He also tells Angela about Vinny cheating on her with multiple people. This is when we also find out that Ponyboi I actually intersex who has been looking for testosterone hormones (instead of estrogen, a many of the audience would have thought). Turns out he has childhood trauma where the doctor and his parents put in his head that he will need to continue to take hormones so that he can become a 'man', never giving Ponyboi an opportunity to really figure out for himself what does he want to be in life. Events happen, Angela comes to senses, Vinny gets killed and Ponyboi returns all the money to the goons and returns to his home to meet his dying father hoping to forgive his parents after all these years.
The lead actor playing title role , who also wrote the script keeps this film watchable, despite its many flaws and constant changing tone of the film. The film welcomes the challenging task of educating the audience about intersex individuals. They never hit audiences over the head with the dialogue. The problem is that the film tries to be so much more than just a story of struggling identity and moving on with life and childhood traumas, especially this case of an intersex person. It soon becomes a crime drama where local goons, warlords are after each other's life. The entire film is shot neon-tinged mood lighting, giving it a very unique texture. It is a movie uniquely interested in the fluidity of identity, frequently pondering how limitations around it can force individuals to move through the world in ways we may not voluntarily choose to. I am not sure of the guy from Vegas who shows up randomly was all a dream for Ponyboi or something real. The struggle of genre was real for me. As a character, Ponyboi makes for an undeniably engaging focal point: they freely float between pronouns and openly defy other’s need for simple categorization. It’s as much a coming-of-age story about figuring oneself out as it is a chilling nail-biter about a drug deal that goes wrong before erupting into a death-defying chase. I wanted to really like the film but somehow it ended up being an average fare with many the makers trying to do too much at the same time. Still would recommend it to watch. (5.5/10)
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