"Edge of Seventeen" is a smart film about one teen's sexual awakening as a gay man. Chris Stafford plays the lead, Eric Hunter, with an understated tenderness and a tension between the two worlds vying for his citizenship (his middle class straight family versus the fringe world of the GLBT community). Set in Sandusky, Ohio (of all the places in this world!) and opening at a fictitious summer amusement park on Lake Erie (a.k.a. Cedar Point--one of my teenage haunts), the film's creators takes the story one further step away from the mainstream of contemporary sexual mores by landing it in the middle of the 1980's.
Thus it's not really a film that speaks to contemporary teens, but one that reminds us forty-something’s about what it was like WAY back then~! All the performances are spot on and I especially enjoyed those of Tina Holmes as Maggie, Eric's best friend, and Lea DeLaria, as their summer employer and later Eric's earnest confidant and tour guide into the gay sub-culture of rural northwestern Ohio.
In one scene that was both brief and profound, Eric asks his mother, played by Stephanie McVay, how she knew when she had fallen in love with his father. She replied, "When I thought about him so much it hurt." Been there, done that! And the rest of the film finds a voice that is just as authentic, whether it's dealing with friendship, sex, family, love, betrayal or forgiveness. Like life, not every loose end gets tied back up, yet still there is way forward.
One complaint? The DVD cover! Once again, completely misleading, and I think trivializing when it comes to the gem that waits within the case.
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