Edge of Seventeen

Being gay and 17 can pose all sorts of problems, but they simply melt away when you've got a benign filmmaker like David Moreton calling the shots. Set in Ohio in the summer of '84, Edge of Seventeen invests the turmoil of gay teenhood with the emotional astringency of an episode of Family Ties. Your basic boy-meets-boy, boy-loses-boy, boy-finds-self story, the film follows cutie-pie high school student Eric (Chris Stafford) through a growing realization that he "likes boys" -- a realization that gets its initial physical expression when he furtively buys a Bronski Beat LP. (Oh, come one!)

Despite the amorous attentions of his buddy Maggie, the disapproval of his doting mom, and the predatory overtures of a couple of gigolos, Eric's struggle to come to terms with his sexuality is a sugar-coated cakewalk. Everyone in the film is just so gosh-darn nice. Even the single depiction of out-and-out homophobia seems fuzzy around the edges. After Eric bumps into a high school jock, the kid asks, "What, are you queer or something?," an event that sends our hero dashing off to the local gay bar, where he is taken in by a suitably eccentric band of ho-hum homosexuals. Edge of Seventeen could have used a little more edge and little less Seventeen. At the Avon Friday and Saturday at midnight.
-- Chris Wright