Boy Erased (2018)

Directed by Joel Edgerton. Starring Lucas Hedges, Joel Edgerton, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Joe Alwyn, Flea, Xavier Dolan, Britton Sear, Madelyn Cline, Cherry Jones, Troye Sivan. [R]

Baptist preacher (Crowe) and his wife (Kidman) send their son (Hedges) to a gay conversion therapy center for “treatment,” where he and his fellow youths are subjected to physical abuse and psychological torture. Based on Garrard Conley’s memoir of the same name, the film refrains from presenting a grueling endurance test of cruelty, but focuses instead on the simmering turmoil in a confused, wounded young man who wants to “do right” by the moral standards he’d been force-fed all his life, but can’t ignore who he is and how he feels. Director Edgerton (who also wrote the screenplay, co-produced, and co-stars as the program’s chief therapist) achieves a sometimes uneasy balance between the sensitive and the unflinching; the timeline jumps are jarring (and confusing) at first, and characters and episodes are sometimes bracketed to the point of narrative/thematic isolation. His steady influence on the drama, however, is commendable—one rarely feels manipulated or coaxed towards a melodramatic response to the appalling but sometimes abstruse horrors—and the major performances are strong across the board (Crowe even finds a surprising amount of humanity in what could have easily been a hard-nosed dogmatist role).

76/100