Boy Erased **** (2018,Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton, Russell Crowe) – Movie Review

Writer-director Joel Edgerton’s biographical drama Boy Erased is based on a memoir by Garrard Conley about the conversion therapy of an American  gay teenager. It is a very good, very compelling film, all too real film, with something on its mind, and a strong idea of how best to express it. Edgerton also stars as Victor Sykes, the director and self-styled therapist at Love in Action, the church-supported refuge where the troubled teenager’s parents send him on an oppressive, bullying conversion programme.

Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe play the boy’s religious-minded parents, and Lucas Hedges plays their son Jared Eamons, a college aged kid struggling with being a young gay man raised by a Baptist preacher father and compliantly religious mother in the heart of America’s Bible belt. All four actors show their class. 

Hedges is an intense, non-actory kind of performer, and that makes him ideal here. You can feel his character’s pain, his sincerity, and his need to establish his own identity, without betraying his loving but totally misguided parents. Hedges waves the flag for goodness and decency – and you don’t hold it against him. He is completely sympathetic, in the exact way Timotee Chalamet is not in Beautiful Boy.

Oscar winners Kidman and Crowe, in their first film together, keep it strong all the way, but then produce fireworks in their couple of big scenes where the film really hots up emotionally. Boy Erased compels steadily throughout, but delivers a powerful punch towards the end, one or two powerful punches actually. Edgerton is good of course as the persuasive and credible creepy bad guy. Like Crowe, he can be quite a scary, intimidating actor, so he is ideal here.

There is a lot of focus on the parents, and the film is aimed directly at an audience of parents as a wake-up call, but even so the boy stays in the brightest glare of the spotlight. Hedges comes through in his quietly winning way. He seems almost painfully nice. He provides a good, admirable role model for young gay men – quiet, thoughtful, intelligent, honest and dignified. And that is what the film is too. It is a must-see for young people too, as well as their parents.

Lucas Hedges is a Golden Globe nominee as Best Actor for Boy Erased (2018).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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