National Anthem

It’s rare to see a film that’s based on a photo essay. Rather, the photo essay of the same name came first. Art and fashion photographer Luke Gilford published his monograph about the International Gay Rodeo Association, National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo, in 2020. Now his debut feature as a writer/director, National Anthem, brings that same community to touching fictional life.

It’s clear that Gilford wants the riders of the IGRA to see themselves in the fictionalized community that he portrays, the community established by the charming and coquettish Sky (Lindley) and gruff ranch manager Pepe (Rosado). They’re not outcasts. This is their home, their place to be – which is exactly what Dylan (Plummer) lacks. Between looking after his young brother and recovering alcoholic mother (Lively) and being the only white boy day laborer in his tiny New Mexico town, he’s never really found time to be himself, until he sees a future he can recognize among the rodeo’s hard-working band of dreamers.

In its depiction of a queer subcommunity dwelling on the ripped fringes of a blue-collar community, National Anthem has been compared to “Homer’s Phobia,” the episode of The Simpsons in which the jaundiced pater familias is stunned to find there’s a gay disco in Springfield. If anything, it’s closer to “Fear of Flying,” in which Homer is appalled – appalled, I say – that this lesbian bar doesn’t have fire exits. When Dylan mumblingly calls Sky “ma’am,” it’s not because he’s some hick that misreads the situation: Instead, he’s referring to this trans woman with whom he is clearly besotted in the way he knows she would want to be identified. It’s 2024, not 1863. Dylan knows the score, knows who he is too, and wants the space to be himself.

Identity, and the space to be who you truly are, is at the core of National Anthem, because Gilford isn’t just superimposing the conventions of metropolitan queer culture onto a rural setting. Indeed, one of the most powerful sequences may be a short video montage at a queer rodeo event, lasting only a minute or less, in which Gilford shows the cowboys and cowgirls who didn’t commit to the narrative trope of leaving their podunk town. They are just as much a part of this rural life – of swimming holes and line dancing and heading into town for an exciting evening at the thrift store – as anyone else in this dusty corner of New Mexico. When Sky mimes to the heartbreak blues of “Break It to Me Gently,” it’s because she grew up listening to Brenda Lee, but she can still shovel shit with the best of them.

Yet the community quickly becomes background, as Gifford is far more interested in the tremulous burgeoning relationship between Dylan and Sky, and the ultimate limits of it when Sky’s already got Pepe. Gilford’s story in one of heartbreak and growth, under azure skies that he and cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi (Succession, Swallow) capture through the dust thrown up by horse hooves and hard labor. If anything, National Anthem could have spent more time looking at the IGRA community itself, to the middle-aged drag queens in cowboy hats and burly Gen-X bears in boots glimpsed in that montage. But that’s not Gilford’s subject, just as he isn’t there to talk about small-town bigotry (if there’s any homophobia here, it’s all internalized). It’s not a grand landscape but a small portrait of wistfulness and wanting in the West, fluttering and touching.