Handsome Devil (2017)

Handsome Devil arrives from Ireland carrying the familiar luggage of the coming-of-age drama: an elite all-boys boarding school, a rugby-mad student body, and a sensitive outcast who would rather listen to music. John Butler directs with a light touch, and the film is charming in the way that well-worn things often are. It also has something on its mind. Homosexuality sits at the center of the narrative, from Ned's quiet self-possession to Conor's closeted panic to the English teacher Mr Sherry, who is discovered at a gay bar and subsequently reported to the headmaster by a coach who fears his influence. The film treats this material with genuine stakes, and the central friendship is rendered without sentimentality. On the matter of social consciousness, this is a film with a clear and specific project: to argue that a young man can be gay and still be good at rugby. It says so out loud, more than once, usually at a stadium.

The representation on offer is narrow. The cast is white, the school is male, and the handful of female characters exist mostly to be mothers or, in one case, a sympathetic presence with limited screen time. There is no engagement with race. The film's critique of the private school system glances at snobbery and hypocrisy, though it never builds toward an economic argument, and the target is the institution's manners, not its money. Body image, neurodiversity, and the natural world are absent concerns.

The messaging, however, is not subtle. The final act assembles the team, the coach, and the closeted star for an explicit declaration of principle, and the film is better for its conviction even as the seams show. It is a decent film about a specific injustice, delivered with warmth and a firm hand on the shoulder. The hand stays there a beat too long.