Someday, maybe someone will make an honest and appealing version of the groundbreaking and window-shattering revolution that went on during the Stonewall Riots in New York city circa 1969. Oh wait, somebody already did—it's a great little documentary from about five years ago called STONEWALL UPRISING, and I would highly recommend it, especially over action director Roland Emmerich's (2012, INDEPENDENCE DAY, 1998's GODZILLA remake) STONEWALL, which throws together a few real-life characters with a group of fictionalized gay randoms for a story that is meant to capture the birthplace of true gay anger and the call for equal rights. The story couldn't have more relevance, and STONEWALL couldn't be any less proof of that.
The film is told through the eyes of Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine of WAR HORSE), who leaves his Midwest home after getting caught in a compromising position with another boy and heads to NYC, making a bee line for Christopher Street, where he meets all manner of flamboyant gay men, all of whom seem to have been shot out of the closet with a cannon. Danny is not quite prepared to live among these strange creatures, but one in particular, trans sex worker Ray (played by the exceptional Jonny Beauchamp of Showtime's series "Penny Dreadful"), who takes pity on the poor kid and introduces him to her band of merry friends, including an unexpected turn by Caleb Landry Jones as Orphan Annie.
Before long, Danny is hanging out a great deal at the Stonewall Inn, a gay club run by a low-level gangster Ed Murphy (Ron Perlman), who frequently pimps out young, homeless boys to rich clients and has his eyes on Danny. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Trevor, a gay activist, who also becomes Danny's first New York boyfriend for a short time. Also floating around the perimeter of the film is Matt Craven as a Deputy Seymour Pine, a member of the morality squad (which later became known as the vice squad), who would raid gay clubs regularly looking mostly for underage boys or men dressed like women, which apparently was a crime back then. While most of the police were on Murphy's payroll, Pine actually wanted to do his job, so he busted joints without warning them ahead of time.
STONEWALL certainly hits the bullet points about what was going on in his part of New York at the time. Police would randomly crack the heads of gay men in the neighborhood, just because they could get away with it. Many of the young gay men in the area were forced to resort to sex work to make any kind of money, and since most of them were living on the street, money was scarce. But the film seems more interested in displaying most of its supporting characters as flaming, angry queens without an intelligent thought in their collective heads or a motivation beyond looting to start a revolution and protest the appalling treatment by police and the city. More importantly, Stonewall, the incident, should never be the backdrop for any one person's story. It's the story of collective outrage, and this is where Emmerich truly drops the ball, although, to his credit, he doesn't utterly resort to stereotypes, since he would have been run out on a rail if he did.
The film's biggest crime is sending Danny back to see his family in Indiana, mainly to let them know he's alright (especially his wonderful sister Phoebe, played by Joey King), but also in the secret hope that his father might be a bit more understanding. He also pays a visit to the guy that had a relationship with in high school, now married with a kid on the way. It's a useless 10 minutes of the movie that could have been better spent exploring back in New York. There is no shortage of interesting people of every race, size and shape to meet in that city; why do we need to spend even more time with the whitest white family we can find?
I genuinely believe that director Emmerich's heart was in the right place, and despite what you may have read, STONEWALL isn't offensively awful. It just selects the least interesting vantage point from which to tell this story. Someday, someone will tell this story in a feature film in a way that expresses the true nature of this one-of-a-kind uprising. At best, it's an interesting failure; but more often than not, it feels like it's skimming the surface of something far more interesting and significant.
