But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

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Sometimes, it’s best not to overcomplicate things to make your point. The greatest farces - think Airplane!, Clue, take your pick - succeed precisely because they target obvious, well-worn tropes and strip them down to their absurd essentials. Done poorly, that approach feels lazy and toothless. Done right, it lands like a sledgehammer wrapped in a feather boa. This mostly does it right. The film embraces every stereotype it can get its hands on - the hyper-feminine cheerleader, the flannel-wearing lesbian, the painfully repressed jock - and then gleefully turns them inside out. It’s a movie that understands you have to fully commit to a caricature before you can puncture it, and director Jamie Babbit commits with full enthusiasm. The candy-pink production design alone communicates everything you need to know about the film’s satirical intent before a single line of dialogue is delivered. The casting of RuPaul as the false strait-laced, intensely masculine counselor helping to run the conversion therapy camp is nothing short of inspired. It’s a joke that operates on multiple levels simultaneously, and RuPaul plays it with a perfectly straight face, which makes it all the funnier. Meanwhile, a young Clea DuVall is genuinely charming, and my generation will experience pure serotonin the moment they clock that Rufio himself, Dante Basco, is among the main cast (hooking up with Kip Pardue, Sunshine from Remember the Titans). The film’s core target - conversion therapy - is perhaps the easiest thing in the world to satirize, because conversion therapy is, at its foundation, one of the most profoundly stupid and harmful ideas humans have ever institutionalized. This film doesn’t need to argue the point. It simply holds it up to the light and lets it look ridiculous on its own terms. It doesn’t all land. Some gags overstay their welcome, the ending is incredibly abrupt, and the sentimentality occasionally trips over the satire. But as a product of its time and a piece of queer cultural history, it remains a cheerfully sharp little film that knew exactly what it wanted to say.

3.5 out of 5 Stars