Queerly Ever After #46: AKRON (2015)

Queerly Ever After is a bi-monthly column where I take a look at LGBT+ films that gave their characters a romantic happily-ever-after. There will be spoilers. Also, don’t forget to buy your Queerly Ever After merch right here.

Akron, which, as you may have guessed, is set almost entirely in Akron, Ohio, opens on a woman, Carol (Amy da Luz), shopping in a grocery store with her young son. As they approach the register, another woman, Lenora (Andrea Burns), enters the store with her two sons: Benny and Davey. It is in the parking lot that tragedy strikes. As Carol begins to drive out of the lot, Davey runs in front of her car. Because he is so small, and she didn’t see him run into her path, she hits him and the force kills him on impact.

The movie then jumps a dozen years into the future and we meet an 18-year-old Benny (Matthew Frias). He’s a college freshman at a university in Akron studying to be a doctor. As he leaves a class, his friend Julie (Cailan Rose) begs him to come join her team for a game of mudball. He acquiesces and it’s at this game that he meets Christopher (Edmund Donovan), a fellow freshman playing on the opposite mud ball team. The two boys hit it off almost immediately and, at the end of the game, swap numbers. Benny, who lives off-campus, tells Christopher he has to go home, but he’d love to see him again.

Once at home, Benny tells his mother, Lenora, that he’s met someone who he thinks he could fall for. We already know this is not going to be a movie about sexuality or coming out, Benny’s parents, Lenora and David (Joseph Melendez), are supportive of their son and his sexuality, albeit, due to what happened to his brother, Lenora has become overprotective. From there, the movie begins to follow Benny and Christopher’s courtship, their first date, first kiss, first sleepover. All in all, things are going well for the young couple. So well that they decide to go down to Florida to visit Christopher’s mother for spring break.

The Sins of the Mother

Do you have a good sense of where this is going? Benny and Christopher stop by Benny’s parents before they take off for Florida, there Christopher sees a photograph of Davey. He mistakes it as a childhood photo of Benny, but Lenora tells him that Benny had an older brother who was killed in an accident when he was eight. Christopher realizes that his mom was responsible for Davey’s death. And now the movie takes a turn for the melodramatic.

This revelation causes a rift between the two men, and eventually, Benny breaks things off with Christopher and tells his mother the truth about Christopher’s mother. Well, it was Shakespeare who wrote “the course of true love never did run smooth,” and smooth it certainly isn’t for Benny and Christopher. After spending some time apart, they realize that they are in love with each other and can’t let what happened between their mothers over a decade ago stop them from being with each other.

From here the movie loses a lot of steam. Benny fights with his parents, his parents discuss with each other, Christopher’s mom shows up and tries to make things right. Everyone spends a lot of time moping around instead of actually talking about the issues. That’s not to make light the very real tragedy that happened for these people, but this section of the film does feel like it wasn’t quite sure how to bridge the revelation to the film’s conclusion where Benny’s parents accept his relationship with Christopher.

In Conclusion: Akron

Overall it’s a cute film that loses steam in the midsection. It’s nice to see a movie where none of the drama stems from the characters’ sexuality but entirely different factors. That being said, it does veer a little too much into melodramatic territory that it never quite figures out how to ground itself.

Akron came out in July 2016 in the USA. For all other release dates, see here.

Watch Akron