Director Ira Sachs' Little Men is a revelatory study of two kids growing up fast under the pressure of bad blood between their families. Early in the film, longhaired 12-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) is quizzed by an older relative of his new best friend, Tony (scene-stealing newcomer Michael Barbieri). "So, how are you enjoying Brooklyn so far?
"I like it a lot. We have a lot more space. It's a lot more peaceful than Manhattan."
A scene or two later, the precocious Tony informs Jake that the neighborhood will be a great fit for an aspiring artist like Jake, due to its growing bohemianism. Both boys fail to realize that the area's rapid gentrification, with its attendant soaring rents, will soon threaten everything they love.
Tony's Chilean-born mom Leonor (Paulina Garcia, the fabulous star of Gloria) is eking out a small living from a tiny dress shop. The shop is situated on the ground floor of a brownstone once owned by Jake's recently deceased grandfather. The old man was a loving but careless guy, to both Tony's mom and his own kin. He died without a will spelling out what would happen if his hard-pressed kids, Brian and Kathy, decide to squeeze more income from the property, effectively crushing the dress shop.
Little Men entertains on parallel tracks. The boys become fast friends and possibly more. Introvert Jake is content to spend his days drawing while Tony sweeps around the hood like a pint-sized tornado, informing everyone that he's going to LaGuardia Community College to prepare to be an actor. Meanwhile, the adults are girding for class warfare. Kathy presses Brian to triple the dress shop's rent, a ruinous blow for Leonor, whose handmade gowns can't possibly pay the way. For her part, Leonor recklessly taunts Brian and Kathy with her past relationship with their late dad, boasting that the old man's feelings for her far exceeded his interest in them.
The American aversion to acknowledging class can be overcome at the movies by pitch-perfect casting. Here, Greg Kinnear, so ideal as Little Miss Sunshine's malcontent dad piloting a little yellow van across a desert with the body of his freshly dead Pop in the back, doubles down on being the blue-meanie authority figure. In an effectively emotional moment with both boys in the back seat, Brian screams at Jake to display a little loyalty to his parents' need to get more income from the shop, despite the devastating blow this will inflict on his best friend's future.
"One of the hardest things to understand is that your parents are people, too. You understand that, Jake? They make mistakes. Does any of what I'm saying make any sense to you? Say something, Jake!"
The boys go on strike, refusing to talk to their parents while the shop's lease is renegotiated. Little Men deftly examines those awkward moments in adolescence when kids surrender a child's awe of their parents' infallibility and become resigned to and even complicit in their family's flaws and not-so-secret sins.
It's to Sachs' great credit as a storyteller that he shows the sadness of the boys' broken bond in an epilogue where Jake, at college, stares across the school gym at his ex-chum, bonding with a gaggle of jocks. Jake stands just out of earshot, as if he were invisible.
A few years back I had a phone chat with Sachs about an earlier film of his, a snippet from which casts a perceptive light on his plan for Little Men. I asked Sachs, who co-wrote Love is Strange with Mauricio Zacharias (also his writing partner on their previous feature, Keep the Lights On), to reflect on his philosophy and methods as one of American queer film's most adroit chronicler of relationships. Those relationships are either fleeting (The Delta ), severely challenged (Forty Shades of Blue), fatally flawed (Married Life), or full of bumps and bruises (Keep the Lights On, a film he concedes was significantly autobiographical). That film was his second effort with screenwriting partner Zacharias, again his collaborator on Little Men.
"It helps that we're both family," Sachs said. "He's the godfather of my two-year-old son, and we share a lot of values, similar curiosities about life and relationships and family intimacy, and that's a very good place to start an artistic collaboration."
Little Men is a beguiling tale of how two young men find each other and form bonds of friendship and possibly carnal attraction despite obstacles thrown up by everyone around them. The young leads, Taplitz and Barbieri, are so seamless in their relationship that they allow us to think back on that special time in life when we are freshly if imprudently open to the world.
At a precious moment when LGBTQ partners across America are launching new types of families with children, Little Men is a funny, poignant exploration of what we stand to gain, but also of what can be lost along the way.
Opens Friday.