A good way of coming at National Anthem, Luke Gilford’s debut feature, is to know a little bit about his own life. He grew up in Colorado, the son of a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. Getting older, he became uneasy at, his words, how homophobic and patriarchal the rodeo was, and yet he still loved its mythical take on America. He started wondering if there were other people like him, who loved the Americana but wanted to come at the rodeo from a different angle. It turned out there were – the International Gay Rodeo Association.
Gilford became a photographer and eventually produced a photobook called National Anthem – cover picture two naked men on the same horse’s back – celebrating the members of the IGRA. This film builds on that work and does the same thing again in a story that is Gilford’s with many liberties taken.
Charlie Plummer is the star, playing a sweet and diligent young man who lives with his one-up-from-trash mother and smart younger brother, Cassidy. Dylan (Plummer) is the glue that holds the family together and he works all the hours in all the jobs – shovelling aggregate on constructions sites mostly – until one day he gets some work on a ranch that’s a way out of town.
Here, beneath a rainbow flag, are assembled the queer, trans, non-binary flotsam of a world that likes its categories a bit more tightly defined. Dylan soon catches the eye of Sky, and a tale of largely unrequited love plays out between the endlessly flirtatious Sky and the out-of-his-depth Dylan.
Sky is played by the trans actor Eve Lindley. Is Sky trans too? You will have your own opinions on that but Gilford doesn’t offer much descriptive/prescriptive detail on any of the characters – we take them as Dylan does, as he finds them.
White-sliced Dylan unquestioningly accepts the men on the ranch wandering about in their teenie-weenie briefs. He’s OK with the cross-dressing. Eventually, after taking some hallucinogenics, he ends up in a threesome with Sky and her regular guy Pepe. All of this slightly stretches credulity. As does Dylan ending up in drag singing his heart out on stage to a Melissa Etheridge song. It all seems a bit rushed. More believeable is when he and his new friends takes the pre-teen Cassidy out for the day and Cassidy ends up coming home in a dress. Cue a meltdown from the mothership, played in a blowsy but attractive way by Robyn Lively, that seems right on the money.
Like the mother, there are going to be plenty of people who consider themselves the guardians of all that’s good and decnt in society who are clearly not going to like this film. However, Gilford goes to great lengths not to offend, while also not being coy about what he’s offering up for inspection. There they are, the gay, the trans, the surgically altered, the bi, the whatever, but Gilford comes at them with imagery so soft and wafty, so shimmery and warm, that in the film’s opening scenes of Dylan’s home life at the bottom of the pile, you wonder why Gilford is making it all look so lovely.
These visuals snap into a grid of meaning when Dylan arrives at the ranch, meets the guys/gals, and the real story begins. The soundtrack too, is echoey and plaintive – Perfume Genius wrote some rueful songs, Nick Urata wrote the wistful score and occasional tunes from the likes of Angel Olsen and Susanne Sundfør bolster the sense that Gilford is doing his damnedest to paint a positive picture.
It works, even if at times you wish he’d take his foot off the soft pedal.
It is a gorgeous-looking film and the shooting style is near to impressionistic at times. The acting, however, does punch through. Plummer, quietly becoming a more significant actor in a series of “interesting” films, leads a cast of talent – Lindley, Lively, Rene Rosado (as Eve’s increasingly narked boyfriend) and Mason Alexander Park as Cassie, greeted with an “are you a boy or a girl?” by Cassidy (Joey DeLeon, also great) when they first meet. You might wonder the same about many of the characters. It’s that sort of film.
National Anthem – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
