SYNOPSIS
From the middle of America emerged an extraordinary double life, a complicated love story and a crime that would shatter the heartland.
In Falls City, Nebraska, Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) was a newcomer with a future who had the small rural community enchanted. Women adored him and almost everyone who met this charismatic stranger was drawn to his charming innocence. But, Falls City’s hottest date and truest friend had one secret: he wasn’t the person people thought he was.
Back home in Lincoln just seventy-five miles away, Brandon Teena was a different person caught up in a personal crisis that had haunted him his entire life.
Like many young people, he made costly mistakes and when he inadvertently trespassed between his new love Lana (Chloe Sevigny) and her reckless friend John (Peter Sarsgaard), the mystery unraveled into violence.
In a single, short life Brandon Teena was at once a dashing lover and a trapped outsider, both an impoverished nobody and a flamboyant dreamer, a daring thief and the tragic victim of an unjust crime.
“Boys Don’t Cry” explores the contradictions of American youth and identity through the true life and death of Brandon Teena. What emerges from a dust-cloud of mayhem, desire and murder is the story of a young American drifter searching for love, a sense of self and a place to call home.
In late 1993, down a quiet, dusty road in southeast Nebraska, in a ramshackle farmhouse, two ex-cons committed a multiple murder. What seemed at the time like an inexplicably brutal heartland killing soon turned into something far more revealing as the true story of the killers and one of the victims emerged. For among the dead was Brandon Teena, a young man who had been in town only for a short while but had already become one of the town’s most enchanting characters: a playful rebel, a loyal friend and an irresistible romancer of the ladies. But who was he really? And why had he incited such a violent reaction?
As headlines would soon reveal, Brandon Teena was not the boy he and everybody else wanted him to be. In fact, despite the fact that he had apparently been a dashing boyfriend to many women, people were shocked to learn after his death that Brandon Teena was, in fact, a woman from Lincoln, Nebraska named Teena Brandon. While Teena Brandon was a young adult trapped in a world that did not accept her, Brandon Teena was a fun-loving heartbreaker with beautiful girlfriends who publicly adored him. What stumped the police officers, parents and broken-hearted young women of the small town of Falls City was how one person could take on two utterly opposite identities and be believed, at least until it all unraveled.
