Nineteen year old Jared (Lucas Hedges), the son of a Baptist pastor from a remote Arkansas town and an active member of his own religious community, reveals to Father Marshall (Russel Crowe) and mother Nancy Eamons (Nicole Kidman) one's homosexuality. The bewildered and incredulous parents don't know how to take it until Marshall imposes an ultimatum on his son: to lose everything (including his family and friends) or agree to "cure" his sexual urges at the Love in Action Christian center. Here, through the Refuge program held by the self-styled therapist Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton) will have to pass a course of "sexual reconversion" in order to remedy his "unnatural" instincts. Put at a crossroads, Jared will be forced to accept the absurd path of reconversion, but the meeting and friendship with other boys in his same condition will help him to rebel and consolidate his conviction on his homosexuality.
Australian actor Joel Edgerton, who in the film carves out the role of the incapacitated and cruel director of the center, returns behind the camera after his successful debut with the thriller The Gift - Gifts from a Stranger (2015) adapting for the great screen the journalist's autobiographical book of the same name Garrard Connelly which recounts the author's experience in one of the many and harmful centers of sexual reconversion, so appreciated by the most homophobic and conservative America.
Boy Erased - Lives Erased, despite being a drama with noble intentions and embellished by the excellent performances of purebred actors such as Nicole Kidman and Russel Crowe, it does not replicate the flashes of the first film, resulting didactic and lacking in a noteworthy direction. The gray and desperate tones that permeate the film work up to a certain point, the underlying message of the reference work is forcefully fed to the viewer through repeated situations and dialogues.
Of course, the theme remains current (especially in an America like today's, the America of the Trump presidency, proud of its conservatism) and some scenes strike the heart more for violence than for indignation, but it does not reach particularly high cinematic levels. unlike a film like Cameron Post's Diseducation (2018), the jury's prize at the last one Sundance Film Festival. Too bad for the actor Lucas Hedges (born in 1997), who beyond his young age and lack of experience (despite an Oscar nomination in the category Best Supporting Actor in 2017 for Manchester by The Sea by Kenneth Lonergan) seriously takes charge of a character who represents the thousands of kids whose lives and identities have been destroyed by the intolerance of the many, accepting all the difficulties of such a difficult role.
Previewed at the Rome Film Festival, Boy Erased also had the misfortune of being screened in the same event that saw the presence of Cameron Post's The Diseducation, and the comparison could only arouse boredom and yawns, made it clear that not even Cameron Post was a masterpiece.
