The Truth About L.I.E.

Films about suburbia typically caricature the bare, brittle conformity of lawn and lane; Michael Cuesta, director of indie fave L.I.E., finds beauty in it, intercutting sequences of whip-sharp candor with brief, glistening fantasy. In his critically-lauded rendering of an adolescent boy’s knotted relationship with an older man in the wake of his mother’s death, Cuesta is gentle, but spares his characters nothing.

Howie Blitzer is a pie-faced Long Island (L.I.) urchin who quotes L.I. luminary Walt Whitman in the same breath as issuing a tide of expletives. After a young highway hustler fulfills the obligatory role as an intoxicatingly unruly and unreliable friend, Howie finds comfort in the company of Big John, a heartily patriotic pederast. While the film occasionally veers into heavy-handed obviousness—could Howie be looking for a father figure to supplant his own crooked contractor dad?—and the ending is disappointingly inane, it resists the usual topical temptation for sensationalism. L.I.E. also manages to avoid the standard genre trick of trotting out every bland hypocrisy behind the picket fence.

Despite its lack of graphic content, L.I.E. has been slapped with a dreaded NC-17 rating, although the highly honored American Beauty exploited a more explicit, and much less affectionate (heterosexual) May-December romance and was only dealt an R from the MPAA. Clearly, suburbia isn’t the only cave to mine for hypocrisy.