Wash Post Reviews "Beach Rats"

From the Washington Post -- Although many critics have called “Beach Rats” a coming-of-age tale, Eliza Hittman’s atmospheric verité drama about a gay Brooklyn teenager struggling to accept his homosexuality doesn’t actually come to much of anything, let alone the incipient wisdom, knowledge or — at a bare minimum — understanding that usually accompany such journeys. Rather, this very thinly sliced character study of beautiful if benighted adolescence is more a pre-coming-of-age tale, one that takes us close to, but not through, the transformative acquisition of good judgment.

It ends, in other words, not in a state of enlightenment, but in sheer panic.

In that sense, it’s probably far more raw and real — in the most unsettling sense of both words — than many movies about kids who, although they have the bodies of grown-ups, still have the brains of children.

Twenty-year-old British newcomer Harris Dickinson plays Frankie, a sensitive, model-handsome teen who spends his summer days getting high in Coney Island with three undeserving mook pals — all of them sexist, homophobic and slightly dumber than he — whom he pointedly refuses to call “friends.” Weed and OxyContin, not camaraderie and handball, are the common bonds of these titular denizens of the boardwalk. As for Frankie’s nights, those are spent trolling online gay hookup sites, where he briefly chats with older men, and then meets them for furtive, anonymous sex.

See Full Review Here.

See the Trailer Here.