Invisible Boys opens with a sound montage of news reports from the 2017 marriage equality win, then a television screen showing then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s press conference. “They voted yes for love,” Turnbull says. Then his face shatters, as a teenage boy with dyed red hair screams and smashes the screen with a baseball bat.
It’s a hell of an opening to writer-director Nicholas Verso’s adaptation of Holden Sheppard’s 2019 young adult novel of the same name. The young man is 17-year-old Charlie Roth (Joseph Zada), who idolises My Chemical Romance and has big dreams of becoming a rock star. When the series begins, no one knows he’s gay, but that quickly changes when he has a rendezvous with a married man via a hookup app and is forced to out himself before the man’s wife does. That sets off a chain reaction that affects other boys who are everything and nothing like him in the coastal city of Geraldton, Western Australia.
