Brandon Teena is a male character invented by a young girl named Teena Brandon. Being Brandon meant the ultimate in pain and suffering for Teena, but her scattiness about every other aspect of her life was matched by her determination to live and love as a gentleman. For Swank to play this consummate role player meant stripping away every trace of her conventional prettiness. Brandon’s small stature disarmed both sexes in Falls City, Nebraska, but of all the friends she could have chosen in her new identity, why two thugs like John Lotter and Thomas Nissen who had already done hard time and were clearly living in a dark emotional landscape inhabited by no one but themselves? Everything about Lotter and Nissen (sharply etched by Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III), shrieks,
’’Get out of town, Kid’’ but Brandon disregards the obvious in the pursuit of love and happiness. Brandon hopes to find both with Lana Tisdel, played to perfection by Chloe Sevigny. Her dream of making a living as a karaoke singer in Memphis with Brandon as her manager is as saturated with purple haze as she is.
In another time and/or place, Brandon might have led a productive, rewarding life like, say, musician Billy Tipton. But Tipton had every detail of her act together and Brandon had none of the above. Writer/director Kimberly Peirce goes for true fictions, although, like ’’Brandon Teena Story’’ documentarians Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottr, Peirce conducted extensive research and did hours of interviews. When Peirce felt that what she was seeing and hearing were deceptions and evasions, she sought her own version of the truth as all filmmakers do. Particularly in the denouement, there is revisionism-most-operatic as well as glaring factual omissions. One homicide victim is entirely left out of the narrative, ditto John Lotter’s sister Michelle, who remained a close friend of Brandon, inspite of John’s jealous hatred of Lana’s new love. But some of Brandon’s recorded testimony is delivered verbatim and the most achingly real scene of all may be the sequence when Brandon’s battered body is examined by a policewoman. It is the body of a child grown old overnight and Peirce, Swank, Sevigny, Sarsgaard and Sexton deserve full marks for bringing such shimmering honesty to this sad, ugly story of dreams that shattered on impact in America’s heartland.