Sundance Review: Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey Shatter '90s Nostalgia in 'Plainclothes'

No matter what the theme parties tell us, the 1990s weren’t all Saved By the Bell fashions, boom-boxes, Nintendo cartridges, and twirling corded telephones. Coming of age during that decade as a gay kid in particular was fraught with a tension all its own. On the one hand, we were finally starting to see ourselves reflected in the world, in media, and realizing we might not be as totally alone as we felt. Keep in mind this was before the internet—growing up in a minuscule farm town in upstate New York, I didn’t even meet another person who identified as gay until I was 17 years old. Think of that endless stretch of years, that tumult of teenage hormones already so confusing, with absolutely no comprehension of where I was being aimed by them, I didn’t even have words for what I was feeling except as slurs and sins. Nobody was asking, and nobody was telling.

And the vast majority of that representation in the ’90s was telling us that being gay was, to paraphrase the doomsaying hobo in every Friday the 13th movie, a death curse. I came of age fully believing that acting on the natural feelings I was having meant I would die, either from AIDS or from violence; at the very least, since I was raised in the Pentecostal Church, I was damning myself to eternal hellfire. That was the most I could hope for! The sense of hopelessness was staggering. Love, never mind lust, became inextricable from disgust. Self-destructive behavior wasn’t even a choice I made; it was what the world encouraged of me. The first time I sneaked out of the house to meet a guy (a total stranger who approached me on the street) I wrote a letter to my mother apologizing for being murdered and hid it in my wallet.

The Trumpian hurricane tearing through this country for the past several years has been doing its damndest to make that knot of tension rise back up in my gut after a too-brief respite, picking up acidic steam with every unraveling news cycle. And so being teleported lightning-quick and efficiently right back to that teenaged state of rotten being by my entertainment isn’t exactly something I am actively seeking out these days, and I hope you’ll forgive me that. Yet I can see the benefit of it—even if I’m personally irrevocably scarred by that foundational moment, it’s vital we speak of those scars for those who don’t share them. For those whose experience then was other; for those whose experience came after.

Enter the to-me deeply uncanny experience of watching writer-director Carmen Emmi’s powerfully affecting first feature Plainclothes at this year’s Sundance (where it won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast). The film stars Tom Blyth (so ace in last year’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and so ace again here) as a pretty young undercover police officer named Lucas, who gets dangled as bait in the shopping mall bathroom in mid-’90s Syracuse to entrap closeted queers looking for a momentary release to their own knots of tension. Lucas has his own personal burden, though—this work’s made him realize he’s gay himself. He finds his life capsizing as the electricity between himself and a guy named Andrew (Russell Tovey) he meets in that bathroom begins to overwhelm him.

Needless to say, this movie was always going to vibe with me. But seeing as it was shot on location at the exact same mall where I went shopping in the mid-’90s with my mother—where I checked out guys surreptitiously, and where I stole issues of Playgirl from the newsstand—Plainclothes really did a number. Emmi does an extraordinarily unshowy job transporting us to the period. The film’s indie budget was no doubt aided by the fact that this mall has barely changed in the decades since. But there’s none of that highlighter-bright Saved By the Bell fashion causing a ruckus; this is naturalistic immersion, and it’s deeply effective.

That’s not to say that Plainclothes is bereft of stylistic choices. We’re occasionally treated to what you could only call Lucas-Vision—grainy P.O.V. shots that appear to’ve been recorded on a period-appropriate VHS camcorder. It’s on the one hand somewhat literal and heavy-handed an interpretation of Lucas’s remove from his surroundings—he’s seeing his life as if he exists within the stings he’s participating in, trapped within the staticky paranoia of his own making. The disconnect is real. But it does combat the film’s tendency to sometimes tell rather than show. There’s a fairly clunky scene where a new officer gets the entire history of these undercover operations explained in detail to him, and therefore the audience, even though the film’s already set up the set-up pretty thoroughly by then. These grainy stylistic interruptions are also beneficial in their way of transporting us into that period, on top of the choice production design and costuming. Most of the memories any of us captured at this time were captured exactly like this. It all feels very much of a piece.

And it must be said that it’s incredibly important to situate this story in the moment that Plainclothes does, so within reach that many of us, including your writer here today, can still feel it fritzing up our brains. This isn’t the distant bar-room raids that brought about Stonewall half a century ago. Our government and our police force and our drunken uncles have all been enthusiastically shattering the lives of queer people all along, every chance they get. You can go to upstate New York right now and cruise this very same mall bathroom and see where it gets you if you don’t believe me.

The romance (if you can call it that) between Lucas and Andrew is kind of a hopeless dead thing from its start in deception. There’s physical heat between the men (Blyth and Tovey truly commit to the chemistry, that’s for sure) but it’s all on the skin; how could it be anything but when they’re only allowed to be shells of human beings? I remember that guy I met on the street as a teenager, and how over the course of a couple of transformative and terrible weeks he stole several shirts from me and then never called me back. It could have gone better; it could have gone far worse. But Plainclothes nails the way it all felt definitively fleeting—“gay marriage” was so far off the radar as to be positively lunar. There was no holding on when we were nothing to hold onto. Whispers of people, frayed by the headwinds.

If Plainclothes sounds like all doom and depression, Emmi injects just enough grace at just the right points to—even among the dark days of today—keep us afloat by film’s end. Andrew ultimately shows kindness and generosity beyond his own limited reach, and Lucas finds support from an understanding ex-girlfriend in one extremely moving scene. And then there’s his single mom (a tremendous Maria Dizzia)—looking exactly like my single mom in the Upstate Mom uniform of jeans and baggy sweatshirts—whose own issues clear like fog as she comes to see, truly see, her shattering boy before her. (What Dizzia does with her final shot is an absolute marvel.) And that’s what the film ultimately prescribes, I think. Turn off the static, turn off the distraction, and look at the people you love. Because we really need to be and feel seen.