Representation can be a double-edged sword. There’s undeniable power in seeing oneself reflected on screen, in normalizing marginalized identities, but an emphasis on visibility alone can reduce complex characters to one identity, one presentation, a checkbox on a list. This is the fine line walked by Anything’s Possible, a coming-of-age rom-com directed by Pose star Billy Porter, and in its smartest moments, the predominant internal dilemma for Kelsa (Eva Reign), a confident yet guarded Black, transgender teenager in Pittsburgh who, in her own words, wants to thrive in her senior year of high school rather than just survive.
Porter’s directorial debut, written by trans screenwriter Ximena García Lecuona, relies heavily on such hashtag parlance, which splits the 96-minute film, out on Amazon this week, about evenly between banal (if well-meaning) cliches and fresh fun. Example: “My best friends make survival look good,” Kelsa says in one of her YouTube videos, which double as voiceovers and effective segues. The comment alone is sassy and an effective introduction to her besties – diva Em (Courtnee Carter) and punk Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson), both outsized personalities without much backstory – but gets run into the ground by the script’s consistent comparison of high school life to the animal kingdom, a la Mean Girls. (Kelsa, an aspiring zoologist, compares Chris to a howler monkey and the feeling of a crush to “having a freshwater eel in your throat”.)
