This corny but slickly made southern California-set drama looks plausibly like a million other period-set Bildungsromans made by the Hollywood entertainment sausage factory. It’s a story of a confused young teenager finding his calling in life with the help of a nice girl and some wise mentors, unfolding at the beginning of the 1970s, and it has all the hippy-era trimmings: love beads, barefoot extras, vintage cars with old-school California black and orange licence plates, and many needle drops from bands like Fleetwood Mac, America and even the Animals, who are singing about the House of the Rising Sun. That last one is a curious choice given it’s supposedly about a brothel of ill-repute, and this is a film about Christians, made by Christians and clearly for Christians.
Moreover, just as Eric Burdon is hitting the high notes about the ruin of many a poor boy, it becomes clear that we’re seeing one of the key characters in the story, the real-life figure of Lonnie Frisbee (played by Jonathan Roumie) as he parts ways with the others in the evangelical movement he helped start. The film suggests the rift is over Frisbee’s enthusiasm for charismatic theology and faith healing, but in actuality he was outed as gay and excommunicated from the denominations he founded because of his homosexuality.
