Very brave to make a story about transness that is both a drama and a horror film of refusing transness, at least in relation to its central character. Courageous, too, to so vigorously confound any border between blatant denotation and highly coded allegory. I Saw the TV Glow occupies both of those modes and neither of those modes, and you don't have to stick your head all the way into the screen to hear the movie imploring its viewers neither to ignore all the symptoms of gender vexation nor to read exclusively for gender vexation. There's also a heavy weight and veiled/unveiled story here about grief for a mother. Also a bloody knot of hyperintimate devotion to pop-cultural objects, even/especially when they've been rewritten and romanticized over time, with a howling despair about "just" having stray cultural artifacts when what you really wanted/needed was community. There are so many stories about the one great love that got away, yet too few about those times when one person tries to chaperone you down a soul-saving path but whom you didn't or couldn't heed.

It's hard to hang in there with a movie that so deranges your confidence of the best way to watch it—not just in relation to story and theme but to a defiantly peculiar and shape-shifting aesthetic experience. (That said, some viewers feel they know exactly how to watch it, which is part of why this movie has already taken up such a special place in the culture.) I'm still grappling very much with I Saw the TV Glow, especially in its early and late stages, but I'm so moved and impressed by the creative freedom on display here, the number and degree of refusals of routine, the sheer temerity to assume such a one-of-a-kind shape and texture, and the withholding of any catharses that don't double as plumes of fear or despair. Via the latter, the movie only further risks alienating and disconsoling the audiences most likely to love or attach to it... but plenty of people in those overlapping audiences seem to have taken that very quality as proof of the movie's respect for them, and as a welcome swerve away from patronizing formulas and easy affirmations. That would be an acrobatic feat even in a less hidebound and craven cultural moment than the one we're mostly in now.

(Blu-ray)