A purposeful blending of pop culture references, from the twisted \u201850s appeal of Tim Burton\u2019s Edward Scissorhands<\/em> to the vibrant fuchsia world of Barbie and her Dreamhouse, But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> could be mischaracterized as pure fluff. The score from Pat Irwin, longtime member of The B-52s, is a blend of bouncy new wave and emotively sparse keys and strings. Alix Friedberg\u2019s costume design reimagined mid-century shapes in modern fabrics\u2014lingerie with exposed boning and mesh, tea-length dresses in shiny pleather\u2014to evoke counterculture fashions. There are a lot<\/em> of rainbows; the home of ex-ex-gays Larry (Richard Moll) and Lloyd (Wesley Mann) Morgan-Gordon is awash in bright, cheery, subversive color. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet to dismiss But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> as merely a stylized foray into gay and lesbian representation (some of it, to be fair, stereotypical) is to ignore the undercurrent of tangible anger and pain that drives Babbit and screenwriter Brian Wayne Peterson\u2019s satire. True Directions, the conversion-therapy camp the teens attend in the film, is played for laughs, but these harmful practices still continue throughout the United States. According to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ-focused think tank, there are 29 states in the U.S. without\u00a0 laws or policies regulating or banning such abusive therapy for minors. The primary friction of But I\u2019m a Cheerleader <\/em>comes from parents who threaten to abandon or disown their children if they don\u2019t \u201cquit\u201d being gay or lesbian, as if choosing your sexuality is a thing people can do. Those stories remain an all-too-common facet of the coming-out experience, too. On the one hand, maybe But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> is a little bit of a fantasy, romantic wish fulfillment. But on the other hand, don\u2019t we all deserve that, no matter who we love?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> focuses on 17-year-old Megan Bloomfield (Lyonne, playing against the cool-broad persona that was introduced in American Pie<\/em> and has subsequently stuck), who is as all-American as they come. She wears her reddish-blond hair in soft, full waves, held back by a headband and religiously brushed each night. Penny loafers and ankle socks go with her sleeveless, full-skirted sundresses. A gold cross hangs around her neck, pearl studs in her ears. She loves her high school, and cheering for its football team, and tousling her pom poms, and watching the other girls on her squad. The teens\u2019 leaps, jumps, and acrobatics sometimes reveal a glimpse of what\u2019s underneath those sports bras and pleated skirts. It\u2019s her fellow cheerleaders who Megan thinks about when serving as an unenthusiastic receptacle for her boyfriend\u2019s slobbering kisses, and it\u2019s a Melissa Etheridge poster that hangs on her bedroom wall, and it\u2019s a George O\u2019Keefe-evoking pillow, with a giant vaginal flower embroidered on it, that she cuddles up to each night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Megan\u2019s parents, boyfriend, and friends ambush her for an intervention, they sugarcoat their homophobia in false solidarity: \u201cWe\u2019re not accusing, we\u2019re supporting,\u201d says True Directions counselor Mike (RuPaul, trying his hardest not to wink at the camera the entire time). But when Megan\u2019s parents drive her to True Directions, housed in a Victorian-style mansion blatantly decorated in gender-normative baby blue and bubblegum pink, it\u2019s clear that this is desertion. They are leaving her to True Directions director Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty) and her five-step process, and if Megan hasn\u2019t wholeheartedly embraced heterosexuality and a diminutive feminine personality by the end of these two months, they don\u2019t want her back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The other teens at True Directions are in the same boat: threatened by their families; bullied by Mary and Mike into admitting that they are homosexual; and forced to endure the embarrassment of group and family therapy and the tedium of reorienting exercises. Some of the teens are willing to go along with Mary\u2019s lessons, like the blandly earnest Hilary (Melanie Lynskey, speaking in her natural Kiwi accent), but others are less inclined. Dancer Andre (Douglas Spain) is unrepentantly flamboyant; varsity wrestler Dolph (Dante Basco, Rufio-ooo<\/em>!) and retail employee Clayton (Kip Pardue) are making eyes at each other; and True Directions\u2019s resident bad girl is Graham (Clea DuVall, walking so that Kristen Stewart could run). Bitingly sarcastic but clearly aware of how to manipulate Mary\u2019s system of rules, Graham mocks the \u201csweet as fucking pie\u201d Megan relentlessly: scandalizing her with profanity, criticizing her virginity, and undercutting her obsessive desire to be \u201cnormal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can obviously guess where But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> is going to go once Megan sees Graham for the first time, languidly reclining on a pink comforter in their shared bedroom, a cigarette dangling from her lips, and when Graham watches Megan\u2019s satin-clad ass as she leaves. But the formulaic nature of their romance doesn\u2019t diminish Lyonne\u2019s and DuVall\u2019s chemistry, or the gentle sensuality of their first night together, or the issues the film wades through as the young women fall in love. Babitt demonstrates Megan\u2019s isolation by often framing her utterly alone, letting Lyonne\u2019s saucer-sized eyes communicate her indecision and uncertainty; when she faces her parents and Mary after sneaking out one night, they\u2019re positioned like a firing line against her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The tasks Mary assigns the teens are goofily old-fashioned, like chopping wood and scrubbing carpets, and Peterson\u2019s script finds humor in how Mary seems to operate within her own echo chamber, raging about \u201cliberal arts brainwashing\u201d and the evils of women wearing pants. But the motivation behind Mary\u2019s actions\u2014to strip these teens of who they know themselves to be\u2014and the insidious cruelty of her methods are never soft-pedaled by But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em>, and the film\u2019s concerns about finding yourself and finding love remain urgent as a result. And the impact the film has had on queer cinema, despite those early negative reviews, is obvious. Consider how Desiree Akhavan\u2019s underrated 2018 film The Miseducation of Cameron Post<\/em> ends on a final shot that is a clear homage to the hopeful concluding moments of But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em>. And consider the tonal similarities between But I\u2019m a Cheerleader<\/em> and a number of other queer romantic comedies, like the quirky I Love You Phillip Morris<\/em> or the upcoming Happy Season<\/em>, co-written and directed by DuVall and starring Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDo you see how easy it could be?\u201d Mary says to her students of renouncing who they are, and for all her talk of depraved homosexual seduction, it\u2019s True Directions\u2019 temptation of insincerity that is most dangerous. How lovely it is, then, when Megan and Graham choose each other, and choose to live as they are. \u201cThere\u2019s not just one way to be a lesbian,\u201d ex-ex-gay Lloyd had told Megan, and the film makes space for that diversity, and that personal freedom. But I\u2019m a Cheerleader <\/em>ends before the logistics of Megan and Graham\u2019s lives are figured out\u2014how they\u2019ll support themselves, where they\u2019ll live, if they\u2019ll finish school\u2014but the lasting charm of Babitt\u2019s film is found in that first step forward.\u00a0 “But I’m A Cheerleader” is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>, Vudu Free<\/a>, and several other services<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is fascinating now, in 2020, when Jamie Babbit\u2019s But I\u2019m a Cheerleader is a celebrated cult classic of queer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":582,"featured_media":14412,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/582"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22787,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14410\/revisions\/22787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/cheeleader2-1024x564.png\")
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