The (Bad) Taste Test: What We Talk About When We Talk About Harry Styles

Before it came out, there were a lot of five-star reviews for My Policeman posted on Letterboxd, a social media site for film buffs where you can post reviews, make a lot of lists, and find what might just be your next favourite film. A lot of these speculative rave reviews are specifically about Harry Styles - about the potential calibre of his performance and, specifically, about seeing him play a gay character in a queer story. 

In many ways, Styles’ public persona has always been leading up to this, with the nature of fandom and projection looming like a shadow over the career of the singer and - I must begrudgingly add - actor. His presence invites this projection and big reactions: his Vogue cover from November of 2020 did this on all sides; from the way in which it was hailed as progressive in some corners, a tell-tale sign about the singer’s identity in others, and “a referendum on masculinity” from reactionary right-wing trolls. The irony is that all of these reactions miss the mark slightly. 

While Styles owes no-one any definitive answers on his gender or sexuality - as the brutal outing of Heartstopper actor Kit Connor proves - he is still seen now as a cis straight man: how progressive can it be for someone who will face no material backlash from being the face of Vogue from doing so in a dress? It can’t reveal anything about his identity because its simply a photoshoot, and to assume that there’s only one form of masculinity, and that something as simple as a pop star in a dress can undermine it, is too stupid to deserve a response. 

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But still, these three reactions all have something in common: a sense that Styles’ fashion choices are in some way queer or, at least, opening the door for queerness. And that’s what makes his casting in My Policeman such an interesting, thorny proposition. Styles himself isn’t immune to fanning these flames - in an interview with Rolling Stone about My Policeman, he insisted that the film shows a “tenderness” in gay sex that he considers to be lacking in a lot of cinema, which he thinks of as mostly being “two guys going at it.” Now, one could never accuse Harry Styles of exactly being cine-literate - he did say at an (in)famous Don’t Worry Darling press conference that he liked it because it “feels like a movie.”

The irony is that My Policeman is lacking in the tenderness that Styles insisted it would have. There are plenty of sex scenes, and it is noteworthy - to an extent - that a film like this with such a recognisable, mainstream star is willing to lean into relatively explicit depictions of queer sex. But they’re neither tender nor particularly hot, which leaves the film in a bit of a bind. 

The thing that’s most striking about My Policeman is just how old the film feels - it's a creaky relic of tragedy and tropes, with a bizarre ending that undermines whatever the film might have been about in the first place. And at the centre of it all is Harry Styles as Tom, a gay policeman who finds himself forced into an increasingly unhappy marriage due to the social pressures and conventions of the time. My Policeman isn’t afraid to show the violence that the state used against queer people too. 

That’s what’s so strange about the lifelessness of the film: it’s willing to look relatively explicit subject matter in the eye and yet it never really ends up making you feel anything. 

“The relationship that fans have with the idea of Styles’ queerness is an interesting way into thinking about Tom, a man who so often struggles to understand and articulate why he feels the way he feels and why he is the way he is.”

Part of this is a Harry Styles problem. To put it bluntly, he isn’t a very good actor. In many ways he sailed through Christopher Nolan’s underrated war triptych Dunkirk, which leveraged Styles’ natural charisma and presence without asking him to do all that much acting. His performance in My Policeman also works best when it leans on not only his charisma, but also the newfound messiness of his public persona. 

The relationship that fans have with the idea of Styles’ queerness is an interesting way into thinking about Tom, a man who so often struggles to understand and articulate why he feels the way he feels and why he is the way he is. I saw some Letterboxd reviews that complained about rooms of old straight men laughing at the film during some of its most tender moments. And while I have no doubt that must have happened in some screenings, it wasn’t because of apathy or homophobia from the audience. When I laughed at the more serious moments in the film, it was because Harry Styles simply can’t do the dramatic heavy lifting that My Policeman burdens him with. 

The closest moments that the film has to being all that interesting - so often it's a dreary march towards inevitability, signposted by the sequences where older versions of the three main characters are reunited - is when it, knowingly or not, looks at Styles’ persona. When his not-yet-lover offers to draw a picture of him (as both artistic practice and a kind of flirtation), Tom says it must be “easy to draw ordinary looking people” and if there’s one thing that any room of people watching My Policeman can agree on, its that Harry Styles isn’t anyone’s idea of ordinary looking. 

More than anything, My Policeman feels like a continuation of Styles’ Vogue photoshoot - something that’s able to mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but probably nothing particularly substantive to any of them. He’s at the heart of the film and his persona is all over it - which makes it an interesting curiosity if nothing else; since nothing could really make it a good film. 

So much of the 1950s sequences of My Policeman - the ones that feature Styles - are about projection in one way or another. In seeing what we want to see and doing our best to block out the things that might dull or contradict that pure, simple vision. The most interesting moments in the film are discussions of art - there’s a lot of Turner - with paintings looking back at characters just as much as they look into the art. 

My Policeman is a film that will always be looking back at its audience. Anything so driven by ideas of persona will always be doing that, and it is something that’s been happening on film for decades: John Wayne’s persona is interrogated in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Boris Karloff’s is in Targets; even Tom Cruise’s in Top Gun: Maverick. So it might be best to treat something like My Policeman - which, for the record, is nowhere near as good as any of the aforementioned films - as a kind of cinematic Rorschach test; more interesting for what you see than what you’re actually looking at.

Words: Sam Moore