Customer Reviews
Beautiful - By: The Chosen One, 06 Jul 2007 
This film was sheer brilliance. It captivates you & opens your eyes to a world some may find foreign. Explicit, maybe yes, but if their were no intimate scenes in this film, it would not convey the true life of Brandon Teena.
I have nothing but praise for this film & its ever twisting & amazing tale.
Please, open your mind to the life of someone who will have an impact on the way you think about people forever.
Floods of tears - By: Bi Sam, 15 May 2007 From the beginning to the end you are hooked on the true story of Brandon. You get excited at the fact that he can be who he wants but then let down & frustrated as he continues to lie to people, yet you can understand his fears as the conciquences are displayed. And by the end you are in floods of tears & dismayed, but don't let that stop you as it is a film that just simply cannot be missed.
The last 15 mins of the film had me in floods of tears! - By: gargantsurprise, 04 May 2007 I had never heard about the "Brandon Teena" story until I stumbled upon it on the IMDb after looking up the fantastic film "Soldier's Girl". It recommended "Boys Don't Cry".
I read several reviews on this film, & bought it later that day.
Having now armed myself with plenty of information, & hopefully knowing what to expect, I sat down last night to watch it...
Throughout the first hour I reallly enjoyed it, it was great to see young Brandon making a life for himself (and being able to be himself). Then when the last 20 or so minutes of the film came along, I found it so unbearable that I couldn't contain the tears.
This was more so, as I knew what I was watching had reallly happened, & I couldn't beleive that in this day & age people would treat Brandon the way those bast**ds did!
I would highly recommend people to watch this unforgettable film. I will be showing it to friends this weekend. And look forward to see what they make of it.
A must see - 10/10
Unforgettable story - By: Kona, 02 Apr 2007 This is the true story of Teena Brandon (Hillary Swank), a lonely teenage girl living as a man, "Brandon Teena." She's been in trouble with the law & has no roots. When she comes to a new town, she is befriended by a "family" of perpetuallly drunk low-lifes, & is attracted to Lana (Chloe Sevigny), who dreams of going to Memphis & being a karaoke singer. She & Brandon falll in love, angering two men who begin to suspect Brandon's true identity.
Swank's performance as Brandon/Teena is simply remarkable. She conveys the heartbreak & misery of an outsider, a misfit, & the need for love that is universal; she won the Oscar in 1999 for this role. Sevigny is convincing as the girl who fallls in love with both Brandon & Teena. Despite its low-budget (Swank earned only $3,000), this is an extremely well-made, thought-provoking, & deeply moving for adults. (There are sexual & extremely violent scenes.) A riveting, shocking, & very sad story with sensitive acting & direction.
Men might be male fetishists - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 19 Mar 2007 A very disquieting film that tells a story that seems so unreal that we need to discover, at the very end of it, the fate of the protagonists to believe it is a true story. It is first of alll a story about the gender identity of a girl, Teena Brandon, who sees herself as a boy & wants to behave as one, to be one. She manages to go through it alll & fallls in love with a girl who fallls in love with her too, thinking she is a boy. So far so good. But what will happen when her real identity comes out? And that is the drama. The brothers or local boys of the neighborhood of the girl who has falllen in love with Teena Brandon decide to take justice in their own hands. First they teach a lesson to that Teena & rape her ruthlessly. But this ends up in the sheriff's office & that is only the beginning of the end. Then the two boys decide to expedite real justice & they kill Teena along with another girl, & mother, that happens to be there at the wrong moment with her baby. The two culprits will be taken to court, tried, convicted & sentenced. But what can we do with such a tragedy? How can it be possible in our modern world that a gender crisis in the mind of a girl may cause such disorder among the people around her? How come the boys react so violently whereas the girls or even older women seem to be a lot more tolerant? What makes such a gender crisis so dramatic? There is no real answer & simple male bigotry is not enough to explain such events. Is malehood such a privilege, such an unsharable dignity that any woman who will desire to assume some of it for herself will turn the surrounding men into criminals? We are dealing here with sex or gender fetishism. But how come it is stronger among men than among women? Or would it be the same in reverse if a boy tried to assume a female identity? I am not sure. Men must feel particularly menaced by the gender wavering of a female who could thus penetrate the secret citadel of malehood without being a member of the brotherhood. Is it reallly an old story? Definitely not. It could happen again any time, & I would even say it does happen alll the time here or there, openly but probably most of the time unknown of anyone because self-censored by the "culprit" of such wavering.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
