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Film Review: "Stonewall" dances around the darker issues

How do you make a film celebrating gay rights that will appeal to the widest possible audience - including viewers who are predisposed to view the issue in a negative light?

How do you make a film celebrating gay rights that will appeal to the widest possible audience - including viewers who are predisposed to view the issue in a negative light?

1. Disguise it as a coming-of-age story.

2. Make the hero as straight-looking as possible.

3. Reduce the gay-love scenes to the bare minimum, and shoot them in near total darkness.

4. Use bombast and spectacle to distract uneasy viewers.

Judge director Roland Emmerich's Stonewall by these absurd criteria, and it would be a flaming success.

Stonewall is a well-meaning, if seriously wrongheaded, attempt by the openly gay filmmaker to depict the events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, which put gay rights on the national map as a bona fide civil rights issue.

Emmerich, who specializes in absurdly loud, oversize action blockbusters such as Independence Day, Godzilla 2012, and White House Down, tries so hard to make Stonewall palatable to the most-conservative gay-bashing viewer that he ends up stripping the film of any real meaning.

His gay characters come off either as straight or as over-the-top caricatures, while their actions are depicted with such fantastical theatricality, they feel entirely unreal.

Jeremy Irvine stars as Danny Winters, a handsome farmer's boy from Indiana whose parents kick him out when he's caught carrying on with one of his high school football teammates.

Danny moves to New York, where he finds a home with the misfits and lovers, addicts and activists, who make up Greenwich Village's fabled gay scene.

Fabled is an apt word: While it certainly looks gorgeous on screen, the Village that Emmerich gives us feels as real as a children's story.

That's all the more troubling considering the filmmaker's stated intention to use Stonewall as a vehicle to depict the hard life led by the hundreds of homeless LGBT teens who stream to America's cities each year, many resorting to prostitution.

Danny and his friends, including bosom-buddy Ray (Jonny Beauchamp), survive by working as hustlers. But their lives seem to have far more in common with a number from Rent than an episode of NYPD Blue.

Stonewall, which features a memorable performance from Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a political activist who captures Danny's heart, dances around the darker issues of the day. Sometimes literally: In one riot scene, a score of young men climb on top of a car. Kitted out in denim cutoffs, women's dresses, or Jimi Hendrix-styled headband-secured afros, they pump their fists in the air. Overall, the effect is closer to a Monty Python skit or a Village People music vid than a serious film about civil rights.

Emmerich, who invested his own money in the film, should be praised for trying to bring one of the most important episodes in the gay rights movement to Middle America. But one wonders if the final product was worth the effort.

tirdad@phillynews.com

215-854-2736

Stonewall *1/2 (out of four stars)

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Directed by Roland Emmerich. With Jeremy Irvine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman, Caleb Landry Jones. Distributed by Roadside Attractions.

Running time: 2 hours, 9 mins.

Parent's guide: Rated R (for sexual content, profanity, some violence and drug use).

Playing at: Ritz East, Carmike Cinemas Ritz 16.

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