His name is Lee … Bill Lee.
Sweaty afternoons are spent buzzed on cheap tequila and bantering with his fellow social outcasts.
Evenings are spent in the company of willing young men and needles.
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in ‘Queer.‘Yannis Drakoulidis/A24
Life is debauched and consistent, until that handsome twentysomething gent wanders into Lees favorite watering hole.
You think heroin is hard to kick?
Try detoxing from true love.
It still remains an outlier in the lit-outlaws back catalog.
And it will definitely alter your view ofDaniel Craig.
Its the role of a lifetime if you hold nothing back.
But more importantly, Lee wants Allerton to love him.
He can get this collegiate dreamboat into the sack, but cant find his way into his crushs heart.
The last-gasp attempt makes things burn brightly until they hit the inevitable burnout.
It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material.
Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig.
Craig goes for broke cruising for sex and drugs, heading rapidly for a permanent case of heartbreak.
Regardless, this is a milestone in his career.
May a thousand disruptive flowers bloom for him in its wake.
This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
