What does any of this have to do with a movie review? When the movie is called “National Anthem,” a lot. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung at the end of Luke Gilford’s gentle coming-of-age story by an impeccably dressed drag queen opening a queer rodeo put on by a local chapter of the 40-year-old International Gay Rodeo Association. Yes, that organization exists. So do these people. It’s their flag, too.
At the center of the film is Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a rawboned 21-year-old living in the Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque with a much younger brother, Cassidy (Joey DeLeon), and a mother, Fiona (Robyn Lively), who’s climbed most of the way out of the bottle but not far enough. Dylan gets by on day jobs in construction and digging gravel; he has vague dreams of buying an RV and going … somewhere, but in a real sense, he’s waiting for life to happen.
A gig at a remote ranch introduces the boy to a community of gender-fluid rodeo riders and particularly to Sky (Eve Lindley), who appears to him like Venus on a quarter horse and with whom he’s instantly smitten. Lindley is a model and actress with the charisma of a dangerous gamine — Sky is drawn to Dylan, too, but her main relationship is with the ranch’s owner Pepe (Rene Rosado), and there’s some question of whether she’s just fishing for this season’s plaything.
Gilford, a filmmaker and photographer who grew up in the area and whose father was a professional rodeo rider, establishes the ranch as a warm, inviting community with subterranean tensions, and he lets the attraction between Dylan and Sky build and crest with abandon, augmented by the stray mushroom trip and lit up with all the colors of the American Southwest, captured by cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi with a sunset-bruised fidelity.
The score by Nick Urata, with songs by Perfume Genius, adds to a lazy, powerful current of erotic energy coursing through the film. “National Anthem” is that rarity, a genuinely sensual American movie, and in that sensuality it connects its characters to the transcendence and union promised by Emerson, Whitman, Melville and all the rest of our country’s great literary dreamers.
The storyline? It’s pretty slack, and there are times “National Anthem” opts for mere prettiness when more footage of the rodeo circuit would have grounded the film in a welcome documentary reality. But Plummer — he played the homeless teen who befriends a horse in the touching, little-seen “Lean on Pete” (2018) — has a natural gravitas that brings to mind classic western figures, which makes Dylan’s accepting of and acceptance into the ranch community charmingly subversive. Especially when he dons drag for a karaoke rendition of Melissa Etheridge’s “The Only One,” and a Dylan who has been buried far beneath the surface suddenly, ebulliently bursts free.
A subplot in which Dylan brings his little brother to the ranch after their mother relapses is there to signal the open-mindedness of the coming generation, but it feels forced. “Are you a boy or a girl?” Cassidy asks Carrie (Mason Alexander Park), a drag queen who has become Dylan’s confidant and protector. “Both,” Carrie replies. “Cool,” says Cassidy. That howling you hear is the sound of Moms for Liberty in full bay.
Similarly, the character of the mother gets a Big Speech toward the end that Lively almost manages to lift off the page into life. For Gilford’s debut feature, it’s still a good start. “National Anthem” is at its openhearted, poetically inclined best when observing an alternate vision of the American West that’s no less possible for being radical (and no less radical for being possible) — where the rugged individual is downplayed in favor of the supportive extended family, where the reinvention promised by the frontier embraces gender and sexuality, and where the landscape is wide and forgiving enough for an inarticulate young man to, as the quietly wise Carrie puts it, “find his people.”
A land of the free, in other words, and a home of the brave.
R. At Landmark E Street Cinema, AMC Georgetown, AMC Hoffman Center and AMC Tysons Corner. Contains sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some drug use. 96 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
