Culture Slut: Reviewing Harris Dickinson’s Queer Roles
Words: Misha MN
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It's a new year and there's a new Nicole Kidman age-gap romance film hitting the cinema, for which I thank the celluloid gods. Long term readers might remember that Nicole is my number one favourite actress in the modern era, with all her icy Novakian-Hitchcock blonde-ness mixed with a touch of pseudo-exotic white androgyny a la Garbo or Dietrich, making her, in my opinion, one of the last real Film Stars. Lately, it seems like she's taken a break from the quietly offbeat bad-wig-wearing heroines of experimental cinema and is trading again in romance, which I will never be mad about.
Last year, we saw the release of A Family Affair, a romantic comedy about Joey King being a personal assistant to douchey action star Zac Efron who starts a relationship with King’s mother, Nicole Kidman. Whilst this might sound like a goofy fan fiction premise, I absolutely loved it, with a surprisingly accomplished and tender performance from Efron, matching well with a breezily effortless Kidman. There was enough joy in the script that allowed for glamour - like, why does a widowed author have a closet full of unworn Chanel couture? - and moments of real connection that weaves in and out of the meta-narrative, like when Efron romances her on the empty sound stage at the film studio. Throw in Kathy Bates as a grandmother to sweeten the deal? Four stars from me, very camp, absolute banger, will deffo watch again. Never in my life did I think this would be the beginning of a trend of more glam-older-woman and hot-young-stud romance films in Kidman’s career, but I’m more than ready for it.
Babygirl is an erotic thriller - a phrase that immediately makes me think of Basic Instinct (1992) - about a high powered CEO who puts everything on the line to pursue a sexually submissive relationship with a hot male intern. It’s already garnering positive reviews and, dare I say, Oscar buzz. Written and directed by Halina Reijn, critics have been calling the film “sexy, dark, and unpredictable,” with Kidman “going the distance” and “in spectacular form,” but what has been equally effusive is the praise heaped upon her costar Harris Dickinson. He’s “magnetic,” he’s “inspired,” he “manifests a monster from the id” despite his “dorky, knife-and-fork haircut and clothes that he appears to have put on with a shovel.” This boy is no Hollywood Hunk, very anti-Efron, but he is a rising star who promises to eclipse many of the boys of his generation.
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Who is Harris Dickinson? He broke into the mainstream in 2023 as one of the stars of The Iron Claw, playing one of the famous pro-wrestling Von Erichs brothers alongside Jeremy Allen White and our old flame Zac. In the press junket for that movie, we saw Dickinson take part in all the heartthrob hoopla, like answering questions whilst being showered in puppies, or trying to guess his co stars favourite foods.
We can go back further though, maybe you remember him in Scrapper (2023), the award winning british indie film about an estranged father reconnecting with his daughter in social housing, or as the hot-but-shallow fickle model in 2022’s Triangle of Sadness where shipwrecked passengers from a luxury cruise struggle for survival on a deserted island. Maybe you first saw him in 2019’s Disney Maleficent sequel as a fairytale prince - I didn’t, I can’t stomach that tripe, not even for Angelina Jolie in cheek prosthetics - or maybe in Trust, the FX TV drama about the Getty oil heir’s abduction. But not me. I first saw Harris Dickinson’s name in gay magazines talking about his very first film; Beach Rats (2017).
Beach Rats is a queer coming of age story, set in Brooklyn, and Dickinson plays Frankie, a tough teenager who tries to escape his fraught home life by hanging out with his douchebag friends, smoking weed and taking prescription drugs all night and trying to get with hot girls, except when he is prowling gay cam sites and arranging hookups with older men. In a world now changed by Heartstopper and other saccharine teen shows, Beach Rats still bites chunks out of the closted life, far more realistic than the twee machinations of Charlie, Nick and their rainbow friends.
I was never closeted like Frankie, I didn’t hang out in Brooklyn with my gang and talk about rolling queers for their money and drugs, but I did spend a lot of time creeping around the internet in a dark bedroom, talking to men who were twice my age and broadcasting a live feed of my youthful face on a cheap webcam from Argos. The rush Frankie gets from talking to these men, the chat that’s equal parts horny and cringeworthy, the terrifying rush of arranging to meet and then actually going through with it, is all captured so perfectly in Eliza Hittman’s award winning sophomore film.
“When someone experiments with queer characters and queer films, the progression of that art form is the most important thing, and if the performance is good, then everything's coming up roses.”
Dickinson’s first screen performance is a revelation. He has that innate gangliness and awkwardness present in all teenage boys, combined with enough charisma and charm to make it compelling to watch. He inhabits his character and his body, but only so much, leaving space for that constant questioning felt by so many kids searching for themselves. He busies himself with his friends and girlfriend, acting the grown up hard-man, only to be cut down to size and reduced to a painfully embarrassing teenager by his overworked mother when he goes home. He is different yet again when he meets men from the internet, more quiet, more thoughtful, waiting for them to fill him with what they think he should be, and when one of his dates crosses paths with his friends, he is filled with nervous energy, a reckless desire for acceleration. It’s one of the great queer teen performances, ranking highly alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s masterful turn as a teenage hustler in Mysterious Skin (2004), and I can honestly think of no higher praise than that.
One good performance in a great gay film might be enough to endear Dickinson to me initially, but a second will make me love him forever. The following year, 2018, saw the release of Postcards From London, Steve McLean’s long awaited follow up to his cult hit Postcards From America, which was based on the work of David Wojnarowicz, one of the greatest queer artists of the twentieth century.
Postcards From London is a very strange film. It’s like someone has taken every possible interest I possess and put it into an AI creator and made a film designed specifically for me. Dickinson plays Jim, a teen runaway who finds himself being trained as a high end rent boy in Soho by some very intellectual escorts so he can go to bed with the cultural elites of London. He learns art history so he can recreate renaissance and baroque tableaux for his clients, posing as St Sebastian in a flop-house apartment, or as a flagellating Christ from Caravaggio. On top of this, Jim has such a sensitivity to art, that he faints when in the presence of truly great paintings, a reaction that gets him pulled into an art heist when some dodgy dealers are trying to authenticate their stolen treasures. The escorts Jim runs around espouse the importance of art and culture with Wildean tenacity and wit, whilst also pining for a memory of Soho that maybe never even existed, the Soho of Francis Bacon, of Joe Orton, of the sexual rebellion.
It can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Postcards From London is trying to say. Are the escorts shallow or profound? Is their obsession with art and history a noble act, or something that prevents them from moving forward? Should Jim outgrow them and join the real people in the city who only care about money? Why does Caravaggio keep trying to kill him in his dreams? Why isn’t the full soundtrack available on Spotify, including the incredible cover Dickinson sings of My Funny Valentine. But the point that seems clear from all of this, is that Dickinson is not afraid of taking on interesting and experimental films.
With his two prominent gay roles in Beach Rats and Postcards From London, combined with a minor role in Canadian queer drama Mathias and Maxime (2019), Harris Dickinson is no longer just an interesting young actor, but this generation’s Brad Davis. Like Dickinson, Davis was a rising star who gained notoriety in queer circles for his powerful roles in gay films like Fassbinder’s reimagining of Jean Genet’s Querelle (1982). Playing a murderous gay sailor, Davis strutted around intricate sets flooded with colourful lights, drenched in baby oil and blood, kissing and killing with equal fervour. He gets just as bloody and harrowed in Midnight Express (1978), where he plays a drug smuggler trapped in a Turkish prison, experiencing all that that implies, and then again later playing one of the truly great gay theatre roles of Ned Weeks, the gay founder of a prominent HIV/AIDS advocacy group, in Larry Kramer’s masterpiece The Normal Heart (1985). Davis would eventually die from AIDS himself, leaving behind a wife and child, and a reputation as the hottest stud, and the gayest straight actor ever to appear in queer cinema.
I’m not one to speculate on the intimate nature of Harris Dickinson’s sexuality, but it would appear as if, like Davis, he is a straight actor who discovered an affinity for transgressive queer material, and for that, all I can do is be grateful. There is a time and place for the discussion of queer roles for queer actors in Hollywood, but this is not it. When someone experiments with queer characters and queer films, the progression of that art form is the most important thing, and if the performance is good, then everything's coming up roses. To me, Harris Dickinson is perfect. He has been the most exciting new actor I’ve made a point of watching, and I can’t wait to see what more will come in his career. I saw myself in Frankie’s late night webcam explorations, and then again in Jim’s study of art history and the dedication of his body to keeping history alive, and I can’t wait to see myself in him as Nicole Kidman crawls across an office on all fours to put her face in my outstretched hand. To me, as a millennial gay, Nicole is truly sacred, and, as Oscar Wilde says, it is only the sacred things that are worth touching.
