Charlie Plummer, Eve Lindley and Mason Alexander Park in National Anthem.Luke Gilford/Route 504
National Anthem
Directed by Luke Gilford
Written by David Largman Murray, Kevin Best and Luke Gilford
Starring Charlie Plummer, Eve Lindley and Mason Alexander Park
Classification N/A; 99 minutes
Opens in select theatres July 19
Critic’s Pick
American filmmaker and photographer Luke Gilford spent his youth immersed in rodeo traditions. His father’s ties to the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association would later inform his visual language: bucolic portraiture and Americana. Gilford would eventually withdraw from the PRCA scene over its homophobic tendencies and find solace in the International Gay Rodeo Association, the inclusive sanctioning body for queer cowhand culture.
When Gilford discovered the IGRA, he began documenting the subculture through photographs: queer couples embracing at golden hour; drag queens in rodeo garb; nude cowboys on a horse (the book’s cover image); leather, denim, and dirt. In 2020, he released a monograph inspired by the IGRA titled, National Anthem: America’s Queer Rodeo.
Then, in 2023, Gilford adapted his series of vivid, gestural portraits and their pastoral aesthetics into the narrative feature National Anthem, a tender and uncomplicated tale about a young man feeling through his sexuality after a troupe of queer ranchers take him under their wing.
National Anthem follows Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a 21-year-old construction worker in rural New Mexico, who is providing for his alcoholic mother, Fiona (Robyn Lively), and younger brother Cassidy (Joey De Leon). Dylan is friendless and his home life is similarly bleak. He is constantly playing parent to Cassidy and tucking cash into a tool kit while he dreams of travelling the country in an RV.
When he is offered two weeks of paid work by the mysterious Pepe (Rene Rosado), the owner of a secluded farm called House of Splendor, he takes the job only to discover that it is a queer ranch. Stoic and curious, Dylan meets the cheerful flock of ranchers who tend to the land, including Pepe’s partner Sky (Eve Lindley), a trans barrel dancer who pulls at the gossamer of Dylan’s identity.
With some encouragement and blue eyeshadow, Dylan becomes cradled in the company of the queer ranchers, in particular Sky and Carrie (Mason Alexander Park), a warm-hearted drag artist who lives at the homestead. As he begins frequenting rodeos and drag shows, Dylan’s attraction to Sky surges – expressed as sexy vignettes in which he envisions her draped over a horse and donning an American flag – and a shrooms-induced midnight tryst with him, Sky and Pepe complicates the trio’s dynamics. Plummer is extraordinary in the role, with his pained, suppressive demeanour eventually giving rise to full-bodied smiles. He does not play Dylan as sitting in the pocket of shame, but rather, exhausted and seeking liberation from his regimen, which he finds in his own queerness.
As with his photographs, Gilford shoots these characters affectionately, combing through the tangly nature of queer resilience in Americana. There are hitches to this (notwithstanding the difficult mission of queering American culture), including the surface-level sketch of Sky’s character, who functions as an object of desire. There’s also the tidy conclusion, which sees Fiona withdraw from her vices (after tearing through Dylan’s cash stash, that is). Suddenly, she’s keen to support the queer rodeo scene and her neglected sons – a cathartic turn, though a lick implausible for this character.
National Anthem also keenly flattens the contention that children and drag shows are incompatible, through scenes in which Cassidy attends a rodeo, wears a dress and lovingly watches his brother perform in drag. In one moment, he asks Carrie if they are a boy or a girl – they say that they are neither, and without missing a beat, Cassidy responds “cool” and moves on with his day. There is a softness to these moments, especially when set beside scenes of Fiona’s outrage at her son in a dress. At times, the film is encumbered by the narrative’s simplicity, but its commitment to images of queer tenacity in sites that typically quash such expression is rewarding.
In my initial capsule review of National Anthem last year, I wrote on the film’s literal and figurative flag-waving: “Whether the filmmaker craves a more holistic American dream or a new one altogether is unclear.” Upon a rewatch, I rescind that sentiment, in part because of an observation made by Joseph Akel on Gilford’s monograph for Interview Magazine: “National Anthem isn’t about undoing the myth of the American cowboy as much as recognizing that such a myth has more than one version to be told.”
The film’s mythos, then, fittingly divorces tradition and intolerance, carving out a safe passage for the future of queer cowhand culture.
Special to The Globe and Mail