Charming ‘Simon’ is a teen triumph
Gay coming-of-age tale has universal appeal
Young and old, jocks and nerds, geeks and freaks and everyone in between should be able to find something to adore in Love, Simon.
Director Greg Berlanti’s coming-ofage tale about a closeted Atlanta highschooler is the first teen film from a major studio about a gay romance, and Love, Simon ( ★★★g; rated PG-13; in theaters now) is not only historically significant but also truly excellent. Like 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, the movie honors and even upends familiar tropes that have been around since the John Hughes era, and it wonderfully captures the hilarity and heartbreak of that universal transition from childhood through the travails of a kid weighed down by one whopper of a secret.
In the adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) is a 17-year-old senior counting down the days to graduation with daily iced coffees and Waffle House hangouts with friends. While his father, Jack (Josh Duhamel), thinks he’s ogling pictures of Gigi Hadid in lingerie, Simon is instead checking out the hunky guy leafblowing next door. Wrestling with his homosexuality, Simon reads a post on his school’s underground gossip blog in which a classmate with the pen name “Blue” comes out. Feeling a kinship, Simon emails him using the handle “Jacques.”
Simon maintains the illusion of being straight to his friends, including insecure best pal Leah (Katherine Langford), soccer star Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and everybody’s new crush, Abby (Alexandra Shipp), but on the down-low he fosters a close online relationship with Blue. As if Simon weren’t already stressed out, annoying theater kid Mar- tin (Logan Miller) finds and makes screenshots of the email correspondence, threatening to out Simon to the entire school if he doesn’t help Martin woo Abby.
Robinson ( Everything, Everything) is Love, Simon’s emotional rock — he navigates excitement, happiness, sadness, guilt and anger equally well, and Langford and Shipp lend strong complementary performances. Tony Hale (as the painfully uncool vice principal) and Natasha Rothwell (as the bitter theater teacher) add to the film’s comedic bite, and Duhamel and Jennifer Garner (playing Simon’s mother) are responsible for a lot of warmth once Simon’s complicated juggling of his personal life hits home.
Berlanti, who also directed 2010’s Life as We Know It, is best known as the TV guru behind CW’s popular superhero shows such as Arrow and The Flash, as well as Riverdale, and the racially and sexually diverse casts of characters that inhabit them. As a gay filmmaker, he has brought an idyllic authenticity to Love, Simon, where a boy coming out is a normal yet dramatically heightened part of the teen-movie experience, just like picking the right person in your love triangle or finding love before the big dance.
Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker’s screenplay offers a wide variety of personalities, even antagonists, who are all treated with a realness and respect. Like in those old-school teen classics The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, audiences will see themselves in these characters, and even if you’re long past the days of homework and pep rallies, Love, Simon will bring all those complicated questions and feelings of identity back again. (It also, like its ’ 80s predecessors, offers a pretty great soundtrack, featuring Bleachers, the Jackson 5 and Whitney Houston.)
Berlanti’s film fits right in with the representation of Black Panther and the Time’s Up movement, a timely project that needs to be seen and will jerk tears along the way. But it’s also an inspiring and humorous delight, with as satisfying an ending as a Judd Nelson fist in the air.