One unfortunate trope of independent filmmaking is the near-silence of working-class characters, as if a relative lack of formal education deprived a person of ideas, emotions, experiences, and even language itself. A new movie that ignores that narrow-minded and prejudicial convention is Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky”; another, Eliza Hittman’s second feature, “Beach Rats,” confronts it brilliantly, making talk and its absence among rough-and-tumble South Brooklyn teens the painful core of the film.
It’s summertime and Frankie (Harris Dickinson), seemingly about eighteen, slender, taut, tense, and buff, lives in a small house in Sheepshead Bay with his family: his father, who’s dying of cancer in a hospital bed placed in the family’s cramped living room; his younger sister, seemingly about thirteen and struggling for her own identity; and his mother, who is steadfastly holding the family together. Frankie has a bedroom upstairs, like the rest of his family, but he prefers to hang out in the basement, where he has a computer on which he trawls a gay-sex Web site and talks seductively with men. He also has a girlfriend, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), whom he meets early in the film, among the sweaty ranks of teens on the boardwalk at Coney Island, under a Friday-night flourish of fireworks. They meet as he and his three pals are surveying the scene—one of his cohorts enjoys the sight of the backsides they’re facing—when a short, dark-haired girl with dramatic eyes and a seriously teasing air catches sight of Frankie and chats him up.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Frankie tells his mother the next morning, after she catches Simone slipping out of the house at dawn, and Frankie’s not quite lying. Sex with her didn’t go so well, and, though his excuse was the drugs he was on, it’s clear that he wasn’t into it, and his indifference exaggerated a curt pugnacity that is his default mode. Meanwhile, Frankie dissipates the time of day and night with his three pals, similarly slim and twitchy-muscled, playing handball in the park, puffing smoke rings in a storefront vaping parlor, and taking whatever drugs they can get hold of (in part, through Frankie’s munificence, thanks to his access to his moribund father’s pain medication). Frankie also begins to have a secret life, making contact with men on a Web site called Brooklyn Boys and making furtive assignations for anonymous encounters, whether in desolate outdoor byways or a grim motel. In this way, he has his first experiences of sex with men; he’s shy, vulnerable, uncertain, but determined.
At home and in the neighborhood, Frankie’s life continues in its casually bruising rounds. He continues to see Simone, using her as the beard to mask his real activities, and the occasional and accidental points of contact between his two lives send him into a frenzy and a panic, until his fear of detection pushes him into action that he regrets and reviles. That’s the drama, and Hittman realizes it with a prowling, active intimacy that fuses the textures and tones of street life, of jolting subways and knots of people jostling, moving brusquely and talking sharply in cramped stores and homes and sidewalks and dance floors, with the tense and jangled inner lives of city strivers clinging to their footholds—a home, a family, a job, a circle of friends. She catches the details of play in the game rooms of Coney Island and petty crimes in its surroundings, the local jobs and confining families, the closed horizons and vague aspirations, the violence seething within youthful energy, the troubles and griefs that pull people together in a neighborhood that’s filled with modern possibilities and narrowed with unquestioned ways of life.
At the center of this closed-in world is an outsider; Frankie is part of this tight-knit community but doesn’t fully belong to it, and, though his appearance and behavior are (as far as those nearest to him know) indistinguishable from everyone else’s, Frankie manages to set himself apart symbolically and warily, if not openly. His three friends pile into his house with him and tease him about the rare invitations to his little basement clubhouse; he jibes at them, “You’re not my friends.” Later in the film, when Frankie’s mother picks up on his drug use, she orders his friends out of the house, and Frankie responds, “They’re not my friends.” It seems like just a rough jibe, and could be—once. But Frankie’s—and Hittman’s—reëmphasis of the line shows that the character means it and that the filmmaker means to say it: friends are people that a person can talk to, but Frankie can’t talk to these boys, certainly not about the one thing that matters to him, that’s troubling him above all. He has no one to talk to: he has no therapist; he can’t talk to his mother or his sister; and he doesn’t know another gay person to confide in.
The men he meets for furtive sex in desolate settings are not his friends, either—their intimacy is physical but utterly impersonal and not at all emotional. For that matter, the incongruity of their physical intimacy and emotional anonymity, the separation of sex and emotion, is built into the story. Frankie’s sense of sexual self-discovery, his incremental awareness and avowal of his desires and his pleasures, is cut off from any sense of emotional growth and sensitivity. On the contrary, Frankie becomes increasingly alienated from anyone in his life who might be able to provide any comfort or support. He also forms no enduring relationships with men who might become lovers (and, carefully eliding spoilers, sacrifices his chance at doing so in order to maintain his connection with his homophobic buddies).
The dialogue that Hittman writes is terse, insightful, and combative, and it’s delivered almost like an ongoing string of asides, of internal or private monologues that the characters quietly but forcefully fling at one another. Frankie’s offhanded cruelty seems like a mask for his stifled, involuntary confessions. As he and Simone loll on the boardwalk, she leans into him and dandles a medallion hanging around his neck while he looks into the distance at a girl lingering nearby and asks Simone whether she has ever been involved with another girl. The quiet but sharp scene builds to a casual remark by Simone that lands on Frankie with the force of a terrifying judgment: “When two girls make out, it’s hot; when two guys make out, it’s gay.” Later in the film, talking with another gay man, Frankie admits that he habitually has sex with men, but adds, “I don’t really think of myself as gay.”
Hittman films the crowded, work-worn neighborhoods of South Brooklyn with as much of an eye for sedimented attitudes as for urban textures. The rugged flow and quiet struggles of daily life—whether among the children of recent immigrants or those who grew up there and never left—also come with unchallenged traditional ideas about sex and gender, and they seem as deeply woven into the film’s visual texture as into its dramatic framework. The cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s darting, flicking, glancing, furtive images are pulled together into an impressionistic tangle of conflicting and shifting points of view; the light, with its neon glows, electronic screens, submerging reflections, and deep shadows, makes the movie feel nocturnal even in daytime scenes, where the harsh sunlight itself feels sepulchral.
Above all, the movie is marked by Frankie’s gaze into a virtual distance, as if looking far ahead into an alternative reality were also an act of looking deep within, at his own ideal of a better life—one that he can’t bear to speak of to anyone he knows, and that drives him ever deeper into silence. From early in the film, when Frankie gets that faraway look in his eyes as he’s staring at the computer screen on which images of available men flit by, to the end, the movie is tethered to the dispersed visual focus of Frankie’s yearning. To borrow a title from another, altogether different film, “Beach Rats” could as plausibly be called “The Look of Silence.”
