Handsome Devil is a charming, good-hearted Irish coming-of-age story that manages to recall both John Hughes’s teen comedies of the 1980s and the string of boarding school dramas (Dead Poets Society, School Ties, Scent of a Woman) that hit theaters at roughly the same time.
Alas, despite nimbly balancing those strands of pathos and humor, it’s in introducing LGBT themes to update those tried-and-true formulae that writer-director John Butler fumbles a bit. The effect is sometimes less retro and more retrograde.
The movie, which screens Sunday evening as part of the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, is told from the voiceover perspective of Ned (Fionn O’Shea), a sensitive, Britpop-loving ginger-haired budding guitarist (he knows one chord, at least). Ned’s parents, who live in Dubai, have deposited him in a preparatory school where he is a constant target for bullying and where the only thing anyone from the headmaster on down truly cares about is the performance of the rugby team. Not exactly the sort of place where he would be likely to thrive, though it is exactly the set-up at the heart of every awkward-loner-versus-the-system tale in history.
Into Ned’s life and dorm room enters the titular handsome devil: Conor (Nicholas Galitzine), a quiet, broody transfer student who also happens to be a preternaturally talented rugger. The odd couple are thrown together as roommates and, after an icy start, begin to forge a real friendship, bonding over music and art and theater. Or perhaps it’s more than a friendship? Ned’s sexual orientation is decidedly ambiguous and there’s clearly more to the story about why Conor left his old school beyond the stated explanation that he “kept getting into fights.”
Sexual orientation isn’t the only thing that’s ambiguous in the story. It’s tough to discern whether it’s meant to be a period piece, or set in the present day. The fashions aren’t obviously dated, but boys’ hairdos and prep school uniforms can go decades without changing very much. What is clearly dated are cultural attitudes at the school, where the word “gay” serves as an all-purpose term of derision. Not that this is unthinkable today, but it is the sort of thing one generally would associate more with the American heartland of the 1980s than a bastion of wealthy European privilege in 2017.
And it’s not just the characters, but the film itself, that appears not completely comfortable with homosexuality. What we’re offered is basically a love story so chaste that, not only isn’t there any sex, but there’s not even a hint of lust. It almost takes willful resolve to tell a gay boarding school story that frequently features rugby scrums, and not have any of it come off as homoerotic.
Another quibble one could raise is that the film’s debts to its ’80s forbears sometimes go beyond mere homage. There’s a quirky English teacher character (Andrew Scott) who mostly offers a sympathetic ear and encouraging voice to Ned and Conor. But upon discovering that Ned has plagiarized song lyrics for his poetry homework, the teacher challenges the whole class with the question: “If you spend your whole life being someone else, who is going to be you?” For a character so shamelessly appropriated from Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating to deliver a sermon on authentic originality is either pretty damn rich, or truly meta.
But ultimately, these are minor complaints. Butler employs creative camerawork (including ample uses of wipes and split screens), a day-glo color palette and excellent source music selections to keep up the energy and soften the story’s rough edges, as the film builds toward its genuinely moving conclusion. Galitzine also ably pulls off the broody hunk shtick and O’Shea could well be a star in the making.
Handsome Devil doesn’t break much new ground, which is a shame, because it could have. What it does is draw from familiar themes and execute them really well. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Handsome Devil
3 out of 5 stars
Not rated. Directed by John Butler.
Starring Fionn O’Shea, Nicholas Galitzine, Andrew Scott.
Screens Sunday, March 5, 8:30 p.m. at Centro Ybor, Theater 1
This article appears in Mar 2-9, 2017.
