In fact, the great achievement of Boys Don't Cry is its respect for all its characters and situations. It's tempting to see their love as transcendent, but it's more confused and fervent than that. They share an experience that's more solid than the world around them, less fraught with distrust and fear. Such questions seem to be in the mass cultural air recently. They're the same ones raised by Summer of Sam , American Beauty , Susan Faludi's Stiffed , Fight Club and Bringing Out the Dead .
Men feeling betrayed and cheated and desperate makes a compelling subject, no doubt.
But gender roles and sexual desires were never so fixed as they might seem to those tending toward nostalgia for such stability. Boys Don't Cry imagines multiple, unresolvable perspectives. Peirce's movie doesn't produce answers so much as it complicates the process of asking. It doesn't even pretend that it delivers the truth about Brandon Teena. It offers instead a mix of stories, brief glimpses of truth, shimmering like Brandon, unfixed and seductive.