MOVIE REVIEW
“Love, Simon” feels like one of those teen coming-of-age films we’re going to love.
“Love, Simon,” Greg Berlanti’s good-natured comingof-age rom-com, walks a narrow tightrope.
As the first mainstream studio film with a gay teen protagonist, it takes what could have been a teenmovie cliché stacked on top of a coming-out cliché like stale wedding cake and turns them into something that feels fresh, even while not saying anything particularly revelatory.
Simon Spier (“Everything Everything,” “The Kings of Summer”) is Nick Robinson, a smart, well-adjusted, wellliked Atlanta high school student with a loving mom (Jennifer Garner), dad (Josh Duhamel) and younger sister (Talitha Bateman), who dreams of being the next “Top Chef” champ. He leads a charmed and privileged suburban life but he has one big secret: He’s gay.
He can’t acknowledge it to himself, let alone his family (even though they’re about as liberal as they come), or his close friends/carpool and coffee buddies, Leah (Katherine Burke), Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and Abby (Alexandra Shipp).
But when an anonymous student, going under the name “Blue,” comes out on a local blog — sending the entire school into a guessing-game frenzy — it hits home with Simon. He emails Blue, comes out to him and begins an online affair in which he can admit his innermost thoughts to someone who’s going through the same thing he is, though he’s not willing to reveal his real name either. Simon and Blue are left to wonder just who the object of their digital dalliance really is.
Based on the young-adult novel “Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda” by Becky Albertalli, “Love, Simon” is produced by “The Fault in Our Stars” team, written by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker (“This Is Us,” “About a Boy”) and directed by Berlanti, best known as a producer on the series “Dawson’s Creek,” “Riverdale,” “Super Girl” and “Brothers and Sisters.” Like those resumes suggest, “Love, Simon” is full of easily digestible, TV-ready sentiments but it’s rescued from banality by a sturdy sense of humor and strong performances, especially from Robinson and a scene-stealing Natasha Rothwell (“Insecure”) as a beleaguered drama teacher.
It also helps that Berlanti manages to instill a winning, John Hughes-style buoyancy and pairs it with an inspired soundtrack that runs the gamut from the Jackson 5 to Bleachers. The result has the feel of such other worthy films about young people finding their soulmates as “500 Days of Summer” and “The Edge of Seventeen.”
“Love, Simon” may lack the artful, literary grace of “Call Me By Your Name” or the dark brilliance of “God’s Own Country,” two recent films about young men wrestling with their desires, but those movies are aimed at an adult, art-house audience. In some ways, the decidedly more middlebrow and multiplex-friendly “Love, Simon” is more radical in that it’s packaging similar sentiments — be what you are, love who you love — in a more accessible, family-friendly form.
It may not be a new message but it’s still welcome.