arfdawg-1 The Plot. Female-born Teena Brandon adopts his male identity of Brandon Teena and attempts to find himself and love in Nebraska.First of all, I'm betting half the good reviews here are phony. So many iuse the same words like "powerful" and "disturbing."The movie is nothing more than an early left wind propaganda piece like The Crying Game and so many pothers. You're supposed to think it's so great because you are expected to embrace the left wing propaganda and march in step.It's rather insulting and not worth your time.

Dave This is a disgusting mess of a film about repulsive people. It's a badly-acted film about underclass, violent, reckless idiots.It's a disgrace that Hilary Swank won the Academy Award for Best Actress, which should have gone to Julianne Moore for her brilliant role in The End of the Affair.

Ben Davis Powerful and moving film, but not without flaws. Hilary Swank gives the best performance she's ever given here. She does a great job at making you care about this tortured character. I'd say her performance is the highlight of the film. Everyone else does a pretty nice job as well. The people playing the evil murderers did their job of making me hate them and the other side characters did their jobs fine. The film tells the story of real life teenager Brandon Teena who was murdered for being transgender, and for the most part, the film tells this story fairly well. Only problem though is it tends to ignore the more flawed aspects of the character. The real life person had quite a criminal record, and while they do mention this several times in the movie, I never felt they truly explored that side of the character. The film instead decided to focus more on making the audience care about the main character, which is fine, I just would have liked both aspects of the character to have been touched on with equal amounts. In the end, it's still a pretty great film. The film makes you care and the more uncomfortable scenes don't feel excessive and unnecessary. Go see it.

Chris L Despite the director/writer good intentions, the movie as a whole turns out to be too muddled : there is no clear line, you just drift inside this group with absolutely no dramatic tension except at the end when everything accelerates tragically. This type of subject must be tackled with grip which isn't the case here, scenes follow each other in a boring monotony and there is a terrible lack of identification with the characters especially Brandon, perfectly embodied by Hillary Swank. After barely 45 minutes, all hope for this real story is lost and the outcome therefore comes off as a great relief for a long and unproductive movie.