‘But I’m A Cheerleader’ Puts the Camp in Conversion Camp
Junk Food Cinema is a monthly spotlight on trash flicks, hidden gems, and (not) guilty pleasures.
by Natalie Bauer
Jamie Babbit’s But I’m A Cheerleader attains that flawless equilibrium of craziness and candor befitting the narrative of the disturbing motives behind conversion camps. Spiritually a dissent from likewise-designed movies such as The Miseducation Of Cameron Post or Boy Erased, But I’m A Cheerleader utilizes the idea of “conversion camp” and bends emphatically toward the “camp.”
Where the above-mentioned alternative movies elect to expose these organizations for the fear demonstrations they are, Babbit’s lighthearted path is smoothly progressive. Babbit and writer Brian Wayne Peterson are driven less by an anger at the presence of conversion camps than by a comical-ethical angle acknowledging that this shit doesn’t even casually work, and anyone who believes it does is just clearly obtuse at best and a bona fide zealot (fundamentally homophobic) moron at worst.
Usually, any filmmaker with Michelle Williams, Dante Basco, and Julie Delpy at their conveyance would be an idiot to allow them a combined six minutes of screen time, but Natasha Lyonne’s sincere naïveté is a categorically foolproof mainstay for this movie. Setting the absurd mood with suppressed gusto, Lyonne peddles the disorientation and ill-advised intentions that smolder in any wretched conscience deceived by their “loving families” into assuming they have an issue, but she never does so at the price of the movie’s shrewdly effervescent core.
That the movie works to preserve its goofy tenor amidst bleak themes is traceable to Babbit’s prior understanding of conversion therapy’s deep-seated lunacy and correspondingly to her command of thoughtful character approach. Handled with much greater decency than any of their conversion counselors would afford them, Babbit’s campers bypass the hazard of existing as total stereotypes because of her awareness of nuance. Naturally, But I’m A Cheerleader is flagrant with silly, flamboyant moments, but also light bits like which characters elect to sit with a narc at lunch inform so much about them without any demand for additional spectacle.
But I’m A Cheerleader blooms ahead of the honesty of Jamie Babbit’s gaze into her characters; it’s just a shame that the movie’s plain fictive framework abandons such convolution in subject matter, partially. While the love affair at the focal point of the narrative is romantic and devotional, the place between threadbare introductions and the developing of “something more” is nearly as hasty as the conclusion that tries to place a bow on it all. With a runtime of only 85 minutes, it’s realistic to suggest that a bit of filler may have done these characters a solid. (There is a UK variant that is longer by almost 10 minutes, which may be owing to all the MPAA bullshit Babbit had to hammer away at to even get the movie distributed at all.)
Corny as some of the plot rhythms may be, an outright platitude is superior to an incomplete one. Whatever the case may be, those brief moments are considerably more enjoyable than most movies of this topic could ever allege to be, and accordingly, But I’m A Cheerleader will possibly go down (and obviously already has) as the most noteworthy among them.