How do you write a queer romantic comedy? That is, not one where you merely gender flip a lead (“rom-com, but make it gay!”) but actually create a story that interrogates the very foundational tropes of the genre? If you’re Joel Kim Booster, you do so by adapting one of the most beloved Jane Austen novels of all time, the one whose recent big-screen adaptations have earned the likes of Keira Knightley and Renée Zellweger Oscar nominations. Oh, and you set it at a gay enclave on the East coast. And yet, while Andrew Ahn’s “Fire Island” is very much a loving and welcome modern riff on “Pride & Prejudice,” it is also a beautifully rendered meditation on queer male intimacy in the 21st century. It is a romantic comedy that is as witty as it is sweet, equally at home sending up the best of the genre and cleverly twisting it into a more expansive space where the concepts of love and friendship between gay men are pushed to their most radical limits.
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When we first meet Noah (Kim Booster) he’s waking up in his apartment in Bushwick. He’s late to meet his friends for their annual Fire Island week-long getaway. And so, as swiftly as he packs his bag (he knows he’ll need little else but speedos and tank tops) he dispenses with the “boyfriend material” guy who’s lazily waking up in his bed. For Noah doesn’t do relationships. He doesn’t buy into the heternormative monogamy industrial complex (yes, his friends’ eye rolls let us know they’ve heard all those impromptu Ted Talks before). It’s why he loves going to Fire Island, which has, for decades, been a distinctly gay destination.
Joining him are his best friend Howie (“SNL” sensation Bowen Yang), bookish Max (Torian Miller) and dynamic duo Luke and Keegan (Matt Rogers and Tomas Matos). Their host is Margaret Cho’s Erin, whose house has become their safe haven for years—and which may no longer be there in the coming summer. With a sense of urgency of wanting to make the best out of this possible last Fire Island hurrah, Noah sets out to help Howie get laid, his way of showing he cares for his insecure friend. But also, clearly an actionable item he can work on so as to keep the looming fears of what that next summer may bring at bay.
The week that follows, a comedy of errors involving recreational drugs and Marisa Tomei impressions as well as rain-soaked brawls and sweaty dark room shenanigans is as wild an Austen adaptation as you’re bound to find. At its heart, though, is the spirit of “Pride and Prejudice.” Namely, the conviction that sometimes we’d do better to not judge others lest we be judged in turn (or worst, let ourselves be seduced by those we’d so scoffed at). This is the case for Noah. Just as he sets out to help Howie land a hook up with puppy-eyed Charlie (James Scully), he ends up butting heads (and maybe more?) with Charlie’s seemingly uptight best friend, Will (Conrad Ricamora). Austen fans may know how the plot unfolds but it’s a testament to Kim Booster, Ahn, and this very talented ensemble that they make the ride feel not only novel but fresh, an instant classic that wistfully looks back even as it projects us into a daring new future. For the genre, yes. But for all involved as well.
So yes, the budding romance between Noah and Will delivers some of the funniest and sexiest moments in the film. You may want to brace yourselves when watching how Ricamora turns a dance-off contest into one of the most delectable moments of physical comedy in the entire film. And, also, be warned that Will’s first shirtless moment will leave you as agog as it does Noah. But this is ultimately a story about a found family. About a pair of self-proclaimed sisters whose journey toward finding, well, let’s not say love, let’s say romantic lust, anchors the film.
Howie wants the romcom. He wants the kisses in the rain. The confessions at the gazebo. The whole Julia/Sandra/Meg experience. He wants to revel in his vulnerability, even if all that does is expose a wound that will hurt. Noah, instead, has built himself an emotional armor (and a body to match) to cope with the endless microaggressions that pepper his everyday life. As he’s told late in the film, Noah lives in a world where he expects, anticipates even, rejection so when it does happen, he can smugly find solace in the fact that he was right all along. Neither scenario, the BFFs find, is sustainable.
Here’s where the casting pays off. Yang, as we all know, is a brilliant comedian. And that’s very well deployed here (he can turn the sight of Howie sitting at an oversized chair into a punchline in and of itself). But the film demands he channel his lisping, campy and sardonic humor as a vehicle for earnestness. It’s a tall order, no doubt. And he knocks it out of the park, perhaps most thrillingly in a rendition of Britney Spears’ “Sometimes” that’s equal parts ridiculous, melancholy, heartbreaking, and just utterly hilarious. Similarly, Kim Booster cannily deploys his “hot idiot” persona and shades it in with aplomb. His Noah may be all muscles (oh, what muscles!) but there’s a quick-witted woundedness that follows him—it’s no surprise he so loves reading Alice Munro.
Therein lies the strength of the film’s script: the tension between lovelorn romantic Howie and aloof horny Noah becomes the structural conceit of the film. Our narrator/protagonist is intent on breaking Howie out of his rom-com trappings but finds himself embroiled in them instead. Only “Fire Island” goes further, and layers on top of these seemingly cliché narrative beats a loving sketch of what queer community—what actual queer communal living—can actually look like (hint: it does not resemble an Abercrombie & Fitch ad). It’s not just in the way Ahn captures a blissful sunkissed (and deliciously steamy) Fire Island. Nor the way D.P. Felipe Vara de Rey’s framing continually keeps several of his characters in one shot, demanding you see them constantly relating to one another. It’s that he does both while nurturing a visual intimacy between audience and film that wholly envelops you into a hazy daydream that still makes room for, say, a great Quibi dig and a much-needed indictment of vapid (white) gays who refer to books as “homework.”
By the time Noah gets his own swoon-worthy “Last Dance”-by-Donna-Summer ending, it’s clear Kim Booster and Ahn haven’t (and won’t) let their characters simply slot themselves into a blissful happily-ever-after that merely replicates the strictures (around monogamy and romantic love, even) that novels like Austen’s so depend on. There may be romantic closure at the end of “Fire Island” but not a sense of finality, just a vision of endless possibilities—a horizon tinted by a sunset that stretches as far as the eye can see. [A]