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National Anthem Revels in the Real-Life Beauty of Rural Queer America [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Samantha Allen']

Date: 2024-07-22 16:52:59.727000+00:00

There are several moments in National Anthem, filmmaker and photographer Luke Gilford’s directorial debut about a 21-year-old day laborer named Dylan (Charlie Plummer) who falls in love on a queer ranch, when the camera lingers on trans bodies in the New Mexico desert. In one montage, Sky (Eve Lindley) — who first catches Dylan’s eye while he builds fences and moves bales of hay — poses suggestively on her horse in a sparkly backless tank with the stars and stripes emblazoned on the front. It might seem a little on the nose. It’s certainly not subtle. But this is a movie with things to say about America, and when you’re talking about a country like ours, it’s probably best to go big.

This a place ostensibly built on monolithic ideals of freedom, fractured by the violence not just of its own founding but of our strained attempts at building a pluralistic society. It’s no secret that National Anthem arrives at a moment of rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the United States, with laws targeting not just the existence of trans people and same-sex love, but the art form of drag, a tradition deeply embedded in our national history. There are certainly gestures toward that broader sociopolitical context in National Anthem, but Gilford’s film is not an anti-reactionary term paper. Rather, he understands that queer lives hold their own inherent gravity, wherever they are planted.

Loosely based on the filmmaker’s own experiences living on queer ranches and documenting gay rodeo subculture in a photobook of the same name, National Anthem does not have much plot architecture to speak of: Dylan falls in love with Sky, who is in an (at least in theory) open relationship with her boyfriend Pepe (Rene Rosado). Some light jealousy ensues. In the film’s most emotional moment, Dylan’s alcoholic mother Fiona (Robyn Lively) makes a scene when she discovers that he has taken his younger brother Cassidy (Joey DeLeon) to a queer rodeo. But to the movie’s credit, it stops short of the shouting matches and tear-jerking teardowns of homophobia that other films rely on to generate drama. The story here is set dressing for the quiet, powerfully unremarkable fact of queer American life.

Bucking Tradition at the Gay Rodeo The sport has become a refuge for LGBTQ+ cowfolx who want a taste of the Wild West, and anyone who wants to join rodeo without judgment.

Like Gilford, I found queer community against backdrops that are underrepresented in national media about LGBTQ+ people, in states like Georgia, Utah, Indiana, and East Tennessee. In 2017, I traveled the country writing a book called Real Queer America about those people and my personal experiences, and criss-crossed the country again two years later when I toured for its release. Both before and since, I have watched a multitude of projects that seek to catalog the lives of queer people living in “flyover country” or “middle America.” Too often, the gaze of those projects feels anthropological, focused more on presenting their surprising findings back to a coastal audience than on capturing queer lives in situ. Millions of queer people live outside of New York and Los Angeles, and yet people continue to be surprised to “discover” them.

The most moving thing about National Anthem is not Plummer’s powerfully nuanced performance or Lindley’s star-making turn, though they both deserve praise; it’s the fact that Gilford and cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi know that there is nothing surprising or extraordinary about queer people riding horses or walking through the aisles of a rural department store. Gilford knows how to frame a striking image, certainly, but he is less interested in the queer rural American body as some kind of counter-intuitive social thesis and more interested in it as a site of desire, play, and experimentation. Dylan getting a coat of eyeshadow or trying on the drag performer Carrie’s (Mason Alexander Park) wig suggests that purple and red-state queerness is not something that can be contained; it spreads and seeps, like rainwater finding cracks in desert soil.

There are those who will watch this film and think, “I want to live in that country.” They’ll want to inhabit this world where studs ride bulls and drag queens drive pickup trucks. But you don’t have to dream about the America of National Anthem. We already live there.

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[1] Url: https://www.them.us/story/national-anthem-luke-gilford-queer-rodeo-review?client_service_name=them.&client_service_id=31178&service_user_id=1.78e+16&supported_service_name=instagram_publishing&utm_medium=social&utm_social_type=owned&utm_brand=them&utm_source=instagram&utm_content=instagram-bio-link

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