Despite the increased awareness of gender identities, there is one classification that has been around for over 100 years or 30 years (it’s debatable) that rarely enjoys the spotlight, intersex. An intersex person can be a broad definition for someone who is born without a number of different sexual characteristics. The U.N. has defined it as someone who does “not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.” And yet, despite the minimal increase in trans or nonbinary characters on film and television, you rarely hear anyone who refers to themselves as intersexed. The fact that intersex-identifying writer and actor River Gallo can bring a story centered on such a character to the big screen is a positive development. The fact that “Ponyboi” is somehow an all too familiar tale is, sadly, not.
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Directed by Esteban Arango from a screenplay by Gallo, “Ponyboi” centers on the title character, a sex worker who spends their nights working at a 24-hour laundromat somewhere in Northern New Jersey. In truth, the business is a front for Vinny (Dylan O’Brien), a low-level criminal pimping hustlers and selling drugs. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, his very pregnant wife, Angel (Victoria Pedretti) is oblivious to the fact Vinny is sleeping all up and down the New Jersey turnpike including with her friend Ponyboi. When Lucky (Stephen Moscatello), a regular customer shows up at the laundromat, Ponyboi provides him with the tina (aka crystal meth), that Vinny has cooked up and told him to sell. While in the throws of sex with Ponyboi, Lucky dies, and our hero panics. They grab a briefcase full of Lucky’s money – mob money, no less – and decide to hightail it out of town. That’s assuming they can make their way across the border before Vinny or the mob find them.
What occurs from that point on is sort of awash in on the run movie cliches and some not-so great dialogue. That’s not to diminish the few moments when the film finds a moment to enlightens it’s audience. At one point, Ponyboi surprises a pharmacist who thinks he is looking for estrogen hormones, when he’s actually looking for testosterone. Murray Bartlett has a small role as a mysterious stranger who seems to have a soft spot for our hero, but is he a figment of Ponyboi’s imagination? Is he a guardian angel? He disappears without a trace or even a real suggestion of his purpose.
While beautifully lit and often framed by cinematographer Ed Wu, some of Arango’s creative choices are, for lack of a better word, cringy. The flashback sequences are edited like out of some Sci-Fi movie and every so often a distracting staggered frame rate will appear like a late 1980s R&B music video (the movie appears to take place during Rudy Giuliani’s final term as Mayor of New York, sometime before Sept. 11).
What keeps “Ponyboi” somehow watchable are the performances from all the other actors in the movie. O’Brien has never had the opportunity to play such a sketchy, dirty character before and utterly kills it. This is the sort of performance that make casting directors take notice. Pedretti gives Angel more depth and compassion than anything written on the page and Indya Moore is fantastic in a late cameo as one of Ponyboi’s frenemies. If anyone is going to carry this movie across the finish line it’s Gallo who sadly, in their first leading role, often can’t measure up to his co-stars. In fact, Moore’s appearance was a stark reminder how much she’s grown as an actor since her first season of “Pose.” Perhaps in a few years Gallo could have made “Ponyboi” transcend its genre, but not today. [C]
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