“I was completely happy to be part of something that did normalize male nudity,” Dickinson told the Beast.
Out of that photo, British breakout Harris Dickinson was cast, and the model-turned-actor delivers one of the most grueling, sensual, and captivating star turns at Sundance. Hittman’s film was inspired by a photograph, one that is inherently of today’s day and age of digital culture: a dimly-lit selfie taken by a teenage boy meant to arouse its eventual recipient. There’s leaving, and there’s finding a way to live an authentic life elsewhere, but he hasn’t reached that point yet-so it’s about, in a way, coming to understand himself and his desires.” He never really comes out, and it’s about him sort of trying to understand his own desires in a world where there really is no coming out. “I guess I think of it as being a film about a character who’s coming to consciousness about who he is. “He’s a little too old to come of age, and it’s not quite a coming out story,” Hittman told The Daily Beast. The powerful film, which earned helmer Eliza Hittman the Best Director award at the festival, stars relative newcomer Harris Dickinson as a Coney Island “beach rat,” a local teenager named Frankie who is coming to terms with his sexuality in raw and surprising ways.ĭuring a scorching summer in which the fallout of family tragedy and the bad influence of delinquent friends threatens to suffocate him, Frankie struggles for his identity and begins hooking up with strange men at a cruising beach while simultaneously pursuing an intense sexual relationship with a new girlfriend.
Call Me By You Name, Luca Guadagino’s sun-and-tear soaked Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet-starring gay romance, might have been the breakout film of the Sundance Film Festival-even its recently released trailer earned breathless fawning on social media-but the much quieter, gritter, and, arguably, more authentic Beach Rats, which also made a splash out of Park City, is first out the gate in theaters and makes just as big a case for your attention.