Given that this first feature by director Elegance Bratton is clearly autobiographical to a certain extent, it’s surprising how little distinctive detail it offers into the mind of a young gay Black man who decides to join the Marines as a way to lift himself out of squalor. We can see that Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been living on the streets of New York for years, having been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union, also producer) home when he was a teenager because his homosexuality disgusted her. These are compelling plot points, especially when they seem to be rooted in fact, but they require the kind of elaboration that would make them understandable beyond their function as dramatic devices, and Bratton never really makes them that believable. When an older gay homeless friend hears of French’s plan to enlist, he laughs and says they will never accept a “young queen” like him, and the rest of the movie simply sets out to prove him wrong.

Consequently, the bulk of the film is taken up by French having to live up to the Marine ethos, which means lots of the usual boot camp crap from screaming commanders, in this case a man named Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) who promises right from the start to “break” every one of the new recruits. At first, French seems more worried about concealing his sexual orientation from his fellow jarheads than he is about surviving basic training—he even pretends to call his “girlfriend” at one point—and the conflicting purposes aren’t delineated naturally. Bizarrely, French is revealed, so to speak, during a shower session as he falls into an erotic hallucination, and while the subsequent bullying he receives makes good (or, at least, better) on explicating the tribulations of a gay man in the military, it just becomes one more test of the character’s mental wherewithal rather than a pointed comment on the toxic mindset instilled by this sort of group dynamic. More interesting is the cruelty visited upon another recruit, Ismail (Eman Esfandi), for his Middle Eastern background—the movie takes place in 2005, with the military still operating in post-911 mode—and toward which French acts with admirable defiance.

The story is geared to climax at the titular ceremony, which is presented as a confirmation of French’s success at becoming a Marine, and as almost always the case with these kinds of “character tests,” this success is automatically presented as a triumph in its own right, regardless of what you think of the military. The outed gay man is suddenly accepted as he is, not only be his superiors, but by his equals, who, in another bizarre sequence, actually defend him to his mother, who attends the ceremony only to reestablish her position as never willing to accept his “lifestyle,” as she calls it. At this point, such a position is less infuriating than it is tiresome. It may be true, but without some effort to help the viewer comprehend what makes her resentment so intractible, it comes across as corny, an attempt to extract emotional capital from a hackneyed response. 

Opens Aug. 4 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

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