Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is a construction worker in New Mexico, saving up for an RV to escape his dusty, dead-end town but has to constantly borrow against his savings to look after his younger brother Cassidy (Joey DeLeon).  He takes a long-term job with Pepe (Rene Rosado) at his ranch where Dylan grows close to Sky (Eve Lindley), one of the horse handlers.  It does not take long for Dylan to realize that the ranch also doubles as something of a free-love commune for many of the queer people in the community who have nowhere else to go, and he finds himself in the midst of a world that he never knew, or rather, one he never allowed himself to experience. 

Luke Gilford directs National Anthem from a script he co-wrote with Kevin Best and David Largman Murray.  The 99-minute film debuted at the 2023 edition of the South by Southwest Film Festival, but it did not receive a limited theatrical release until July of the following year; a joint effort by LD Entertainment and Variance Films. Running for seven weeks in the summer, the niche-presenting film never broke 200 screens, but it is a far more accessible film than the market gave it credit for.

National Anthem walks the line of documentary and narrative similar to how Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) allows general audiences a peak into a world they may be unfamiliar with. Gilford and the script writing team handle this marginalized community – queer rodeo workers – with the tender understanding of a gentlehearted outsider, but it struggles to serve both narrative masters, a coming-of-age drama and walk-and-talk documentary, and the transitions between these two styles sometimes feel jarring. 

Thankfully, though, the narrative side of the film is very well done, led by Plummer’s Dylan.  The young man has an overwhelming sense of dissatisfied melancholy about him, tied to a life leading nowhere due to a responsibility towards his younger brother in the maternal absence of their alcoholic mother.  Plummer is an actor who has been building an impeccable resume for himself becoming an undersung song of independent titles almost guaranteeing audiences they are in for a thought-provoking film when his name is attached to the title.  Dylan is a very guarded character, very close to an enigma that will graft his personality onto who he is surrounded by, but the most impressive thing about his performance is that we never totally feel that Dylan loses himself in this new environment.  Further, Plummer has a confounding role on the page and it is a credit both to his sensibilities as a performer and to Gilford for his direction who helps him navigate a performance so that we in the audience, importantly, never feel like Dylan is being groomed – for lack of a better word and to preemptively dismantle the potential bad-faith critique of the film – as he grows closer to the heart of the ranch. 

That seems like a gross leap to take, but the film offers quite a few opportunities where we question the line of where Dylan’s boundaries are, but that is because it is, at its core, a coming-of-age drama, and the redrawing of lines are an integral part of these stories. Here, the film is always walking the tenuous line of consent, especially in the early part of the film when Gilford needs to show us a crack in the wall that Dylan has built around himself.  This comes most clearly in the sequence at the box store where Sky and her crew run into Dylan and show him the whimsy that is possible in everyday life if only one allows themselves to embrace it.  It is as if there is no one else in the store – nay, the world – to tell them no, but when the fantasy breaks and Dylan still has the blue eyeshadow on, suddenly what felt so free is replaced with an oppressive feeling of self-consciousness.  Katelin Arizmendi’s lens captures the regular folk as they glare at the boy in makeup, and it is such a powerful filmic representation of the internal fear so many feel when they are being true to themselves, especially for the first time.  The truth is, the majority of people in the store are not staring at the eyeliner, the painted nails, the unique style; they are just trying to find the Mini Wheats and leave. 

Later in the film, there is another big moment for Dylan at the beach where he experiences just how freely the love flows in Pepe’s commune, and it offers Gilford a chance to frame the narrative a little more traditionally than the sense of following the dust on the wind that much of the first half of the film seemed to adopt.  The narrative tiptoes across another line of discovery for Dylan as he, Sky, and Pepe share a moment of passion. Far from the crowd and in relative privacy, they engage in a spur of the moment ménage à trois, and while in many queer coming of age films this moment would be one of self-discovery and catharsis, here it is met with heels being dug into the ground.  Lustfully shot by Arizmendi, it allows Dylan to experiment in a slightly controlled environment and it is filmed in a way that is safe and does not feel totally exploitative, but what it does do is show a rift that had been slowly and sneakily fracturing in the background and will go on to inform the back half of the narrative.   

This breaking of boundaries all works in service to a drag performance by Dylan which is overwhelmingly loose and free, and in all the best ways.  Coming to the stage in a red dress, it provides a pop of color in the otherwise dusty – albeit never not beautiful – landscapes.  Coupled with Cassidy’s effusive engagement with the act, this scene is one of the most joyous of the film, but it lacks the depth on the page equal to the emotional importance that Plummer allows Dylan to experience in front of the lens.  It is not purely showing off, but it is handled so quickly that it does not change the story of the film in the way it seems like this kind of revelation should, nor does Dylan have a moment where he decides that it is not really for him, either.  He is again stuck between worlds without much of a compass to guide him home. It is one of the most jarring examples of a lack of concrete characters which plagues the whole film and pulls the story down with it.  These characters are all just a touch too thin to make this the hard-hitting drama that it aspires to be. 

For a directorial debut after a history of shorts, television, and music videos – a similar pedigree to that of his scriptwriting team as well – they work with an efficiency that is sometimes lost in features given the luxury of a longer runtime and freedom from ad breaks.  While National Anthem never feels like anything but a film, it still carries with it a few of the trappings of a first feature, though very well hidden by Kelly McGehee’s fully realized production design and smoothed over in Amber Bansak and Josh Schaeffer’s edit.  For example, the film takes an unnecessarily shocking and nasty turn as it teeters into the third act, and while it does tell a very beautiful story of acceptance and found family, it treats Dylan a little too benevolently as the outsider who comes in and excels at a new way of life in such a way that bends our credulity.  Those few cracks notwithstanding, Gilford and his team bring about a tender tale of a marginalized community in the southwest heartland.  The purposeful juxtaposition queer characters adorned in the red, white, and blue of the rodeo is not done to shock, but further proves the point of the integral diversity that can be found and should be allowed to thrive in the melting pot that is the United States of America.