HyperLoop555

Boy Erased is the kind of topical, well-intentioned movie that makes you wish it was slightly better than it is. Based on the real-life coming-of-age sexual-identity struggle of Garrard Conley, the film is directed (a bit flatly) by the actor Joel Edgerton, who showed promise as a multihyphenate with his creepy 2015 thriller The Gift. The boy in Boy Erased is played by Lucas Hedges, and the 19-year-old isn’t so much erased as cast aside like an inconvenience by his Arkansas Bible Belt parents — a conservative pastor (a bearlike Russell Crowe) and a pushover-till-late-in-the-game mother (Nicole Kidman, excellent under a Dollywood wig). Hedges’ Jared is ashamed and terrified by the attraction he feels to other boys. Jared’s parents aren’t prepared to deal with their son’s yearnings, so they pack him off to a conversion-therapy program run by a bullying tyrant (Edgerton), which runs on the principle that there’s no sinful urge a trip to the batting cages can’t fix. Hedges, so good...

“Boy Erased” is neither the first, nor the best, of this year’s films about the crucible of gay conversion therapy, but Joel Edgerton’s adaptation of Garrard Conley’s memoir is most interesting for the ways that it differs from “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” Although it’s fortunate we have both, and tragic that we need either, “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” leveraged the awful and dehumanizing evangelical practice into a coming-of-age saga about a teenage girl’s hard-won self-acceptance; “Boy Erased” uses a similar premise to deflect that burden outward — to put the onus for change and understanding on the misguided people who surround its traumatized young protagonist. The result is a powerfully conflicted portrait of the relationship between love and hate, a story in which all but the ugliest bigotries can be traced back to a misguided sense of protection. While Edgerton’s fractured approach has a frustrating way of compartmentalizing his characters into their own subplo...