Lonesome: Film Review

At the beginning of Craig Boreham’s erotic drama Lonesome, we see a young man (Josh Lavery) hitchhiking down a rural highway. We don’t know who he is or where he’s going, just that he’s a cowboy. His hat, boots, jeans and flannel shirt make that clear enough. He’s also broke, as we learn when he swipes a half-eaten hamburger off the table of a gas station restaurant. He then spots a bearded truck driver. They make long eye contact. A moment later we see them having sex in a bathroom stall.

The young cowboy finds his way to Sydney, Australia where, after he sneaks into a party and steals a bottle of Jack Daniels, he scrolls through an app and finds himself joining a threesome. In a large loft, he locks naked with a young Sydneysider, Tib (Daniel Gabriel). Their sexual chemistry quickly forms the basis of an uncertain romance, as the two men — and the movie in general — make the mistake of believing that their physical connection will necessarily translate into emotional connection.

The film spends a lot of time showing the young cowboy — Casey — and his new city-dwelling partner having sex, hanging out naked in their apartment, walking naked at the beach and taking their shirts off when they work odd jobs together. But that physical openness never leads us to feel their heart-to-heart connection. They don’t have much that brings them together emotionally, besides a distant relationship with their parents (not exactly un-examined territory in LGBT dramas). And their conversations largely consist of stilted flirting and awkward sexual humor involving the phallic shapes of potatoes at the grocery store and creative use of the word “Cumin.”

Their relationship never clicks largely because we never buy into Casey’s character as a whole. As he walks down the streets of Sydney at the film’s beginning, his flannel open to his white t-shirt, and drinks Jack Daniels directly from the bottle, we feel aware that we’re watching an actor dressed up as a cowboy. If he were to lean against a pick-up truck and sing a song about cold beer and blue jeans, we wouldn’t be that surprised.

Lavery’s controlled and understated performance makes the most of the generic “country boy” behavior he’s made to play: Casey eats with his hands, forgets to put a coaster on a wooden table, asks, “Can I piss?” before correcting himself to “Can I use the bathroom?” The script seems uninterested in the specificity of Western Australia’s farm life beyond a vague, rural unfriendliness to gay people. As a result, it never grants the main character the kind of specificity that might make him real and compelling.

Instead, Lonesome tries to achieve this by consistently presenting Casey in a series of physically private acts — showering, peeing and sex scene after sex scene. Rather than make him vivid, he as well as his relationship with Tib become banal. So little is left to the imagination that we lose the suggestiveness that creates sensuality, the mystery that enlivens romance. Without those key ingredients, the film is unable to provide much more than glorified pornography.