Love, Simon

Teen movies continue to be popular for a whole bunch of reasons. The high-school experience tends to be one of those periods of life where, even if there's particular personal variations, certain common threads hold true - the opening flush of love and sexuality, the tensions and growing pains as you begin to find your place in the world and your own sense of certainty in yourself and others.

There hasn't really been a mainstream gay teen movie, though, until now. Yes, there's a bunch of arthouse options out there and films made for a specialist gay market, but "Love, Simon" is unashamedly mainstream, for a broad audience. It's probably the funniest of its type since "Easy A" gave us Emma Stone, and while, no, I don't necessarily expect lead actor Nick Robinson to be troubling the Oscar stage any time soon, still, this does have the necessary mix of humour and heart to capture the attention. In this case, it's about the challenges of coming out, both to yourself and to everyone else - that, while in our somewhat more progressive times it may seem an easy step, it's still fraught with dangers (though, yes, they're very middle-class kinda dangers). It only suffers occasionally from the teen movie syndrome where the writers are clearly well out of their teenage years and drop references that realistically probably wouldn't really mean much to their characters.

There's a lot of ways this could be argued to be a small toe-in-the-water. It's really not a gay romantic comedy at all as, for 99% of the film, Simon has no idea who the other gay man he's talking to might be (the internet and the benefit of online aliases does a lot of work here) - you get a version of gay desire that is high on the longing and low on actual physical passion. Still, that's the nature of getting into the mainstream - some of the rougher edges are going to get sanded off. And the basic spirit is sound - presenting a teen comedy for a broad audience that lets gay desire be a real and central part of the story. I don't really want to overstate this film - it's merely very sweet and good rather than superbly excellent - but it's an important cultural moment to have, and one I hope is joined by a whole bunch of others.