When casting for his second feature, Lonesome, the Sydney writer-director Craig Boreham turned to Grindr. He wanted actors who knew the film’s world, not just of gay hookups and casual sex but the desires that can fuel these encounters: boredom, horniness, intense isolation.
Casey (Josh Lavery) is propelled by all of the above: a country boy leaving his small town to get his “big-smoke slut on”, as his first Sydney hookup Tib (Daniel Gabriel) says. With his wide eyes, ripped torso and cowboy hat, Casey resembles a man hoping to be mistaken for a myth – but glance underneath his hat’s rim and you’ll see a hurt soul, having long internalised that his only value is his looks.
Lonesome’s plot, as you can probably tell, is well-trodden territory: a queer coming-of-age story in which a young person finds and/or loses themselves in the sex, drugs and other vices of a big city, and has to decide whether they’re deserving of love. Call it cliche, but Boreham is working with common LGBTQI+ experiences – tropes much more frustrating to live through than to see again on screen.
Beyond the canon of queer films described by that log line (ranging from 1972 arthouse porn LA Plays Itself to the 2019 Australian thriller Sequin in a Blue Room), Lonesome shares a few similarities with Teenage Kicks, Boreham’s 2016 debut feature. Both feature pretty lead actors whose vacant stares suffice for interiority as their characters make bad decisions, haunted by family trauma.
But Lonesome is filled with sparks of brilliance that bounce off these familiar beats – a verité charisma that owes much to Boreham’s app-based casting, as well as the cinematographer Dean Francis’s wonderful control of light. Shot across four weeks during the 2021 Covid lockdowns, Lonesome takes advantage of Sydney’s relative quiet: Prince Alfred Park and King and Oxford streets are alluring and vibrant if not a little chilly, like the late winter sun. Sydney is many things but it’s not an overtly inviting city to newcomers: it’s impressive to have captured that on camera without resorting to standard images of urban ugliness.
That coldness suits the film, as Lonesome also isn’t overtly inviting to outsiders, either. As an unapologetically erotic and unsanitised movie, it goes against the current grain of largely sexless coming-of-age queer romances about men – think the pan to the window pre-coitus in Call Me By Your Name, or the cutesy romance of Heartstopper. Casey and Tib’s complex relationship is far from framed as true love: the two can be casually cruel to each other, pre-emptively cutting themselves off from a genuine connection to avoid more hurt. Instead, they and Lonesome are focused on, to adopt the film’s frankness, fucking: across the R18+ movie’s 94 minutes, we see anal sex, threesomes, orgies, choking, bootlicking, truck-stop cruising, cum shots, fisting and food play. But these scenes between Casey, Tib and their various hookups are valuable not for their explicitness alone, but their believability.
Lonesome’s acting may be stilted at times but it shines in the sex scenes: the intimacy coordinator, Leah Pellinkhof, worked with Boreham and the actors to make these moments as visceral as possible, which means we feel the awkward beats on film that are usually ignored in the moment. Everyone in Lonesome is posturing to be wanted. Casey emulates Midnight Cowboys’ Joe Buck; others lean into cringe-inducing dirty talk taken from porn, or a slow saunter nude at cruising spot Congwong beach. But the film resists moral judgment: no one is punished for their ethical transgressions or sexual desperation. Even a demeaning leather daddy, played by the ex-rugby league star and gay activist Ian Roberts in some of the film’s hardest-to-watch scenes, is given a brief moment of tenderness.
As Tib, newcomer Gabriel offers some of the film’s most lived-in work – during difficult moments, their body radiates an inner tension that melts when the two manage to let go, whether dancing in their underwear or messing around. Lavery noticeably picks up throughout these scenes, too, as Casey releases some of that inner weight and drops his usual stone-faced expression. It’s here that Lonesome feels real, where the chemistry makes cliches land more like common queer experiences.
Where Teenage Kicks swung for the canon of LGBTQI+ coming-of-age films, Lonesome is happy to be a provocative talking point, establishing Boreham as a queer film-maker unafraid of making an important or niche work. Hopefully the emergence of more queer Australian film-makers – Goran Stolevski, Katie Found and Monica Zanetti among them – will free up Boreham and his contemporaries to make riskier, less palatable queer films. No longer carrying the lonely burden of creating the next definitive LGBTQI+ Australian film, they can get down and dirty.
Lonesome is in cinemas from Thursday
