First look at new Timothée Chalamet film

Call Me By Your Name put Timothée Chalamet on our gaydar and his latest film, Bones and All has something queer about it.

Bones and All is being described as a story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter; a liberating road odyssey of two young people coming into their own, searching for identity and chasing beauty in a perilous world that cannot abide who they are.

Chalamet, who is increasingly being seen publicly in gender-fluid clothing while apparently identifying as straight, is arguably more popular with lesbians than with gay men, and has been criticized by Billy Porter for appropriating gender non-conforming fashion. Nevertheless, he is one of the most interesting young actors to watch in the way he has rejected masculinism.

What we’re excited for:

Stories about first love can be nauseating, or they can resonate with queer audiences, depending on approach. If the lovers are outsiders, it’s usually easier to relate. Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), an intense and disenfranchised drifter, meet and embark on a thousand-mile odyssey across Ronald Reagan’s America. But all roads lead back to the fact that they are outsiders to the world and maybe to each other after all. Will their love survive? Sounds like a metaphor for queerness to us! And the supporting cast includes some great actors: Chloë Sevigny (Lizzie), Jessica Harper (Suspiria), and stage legend Mark Rylance.

Meagan Navarro from Bloody Disgusting writes: “Beneath the viscera and grue is a tender and affecting tale of first love and discovery. It’s as elegant as carnal and carnivorous, and it’ll take a bite out of your heart if you let it.”

What’s queer about it?:

Marginalized hunger does strike us as queer, and this is a tale of young lovers on the run but with a twist. While road movies are a well-worn genre often populated by straight misfits (Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Natural Born Killers), these young lovers are on the outer edges of society because of their forbidden desires. Instead of robbing banks, for example, they eat people.

“[Luca] Guadagnino’s latest film makes for a fascinating counterpoint to his previous collaboration with Chalamet, 2017’s ‘Call Me By Your Name.’ Unlike that film’s clandestine gay courtship, which occurs under the auspices of an Italian estate populated by at least nominally tolerant intellectuals, ‘Bones and All’ explores unexpected desire from the shadows of Reaganite wreckage in middle America,” writes Marshall Shaffer. “After a titillated Maren devours a female friend’s finger at a sleepover, her single father (André Holland) forces her to uproot her life and hit the road. It’s amidst the detritus of America’s forgotten spaces that she begins to encounter others who share her bloodlust.”

Mark Rylance tried to give the film context in an interview with British GQ:

“[I]t’s got a very thoughtful aspect to it about things that we inherit from our parents. A little bit like Call Me By Your Name, in terms of discovering you are gay, something you didn’t know about yourself. How do you deal with that? Thankfully, in the West it’s easier now than, say, if you discovered that in Afghanistan or somewhere where it would be a death sentence.”

What we’re worried about:

Can a movie about young cannibals in love appeal to Queer Forty readers? Well, Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a film set in the 1980s, resonated with pretty much anyone who can recall how hard it was to be openly queer, lesbian, gay or transgender during a decade when just loving anyone felt like it could kill you. And sometimes did. Bones and All is set not in Europe but against the badlands of Reagan’s America, and so may be cathartic for those who wish to revisit how alienating it was back then to live and love according to a need that was not socially sanctioned. But hey, the metaphor of cannibalism for marginalized identity may not sit well, especially after Jeffrey Dahmer.

“Lee [Chalamet] is a post-punk chancer, drifter and hustler, sating his appetite for warm human meat partly by picking up gay men (it’s here that the film strikes one of its few off notes: deep down, we realise, Bones and All is strangely hetero-normative),” says Screen Daily.

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino

Screenplay by: David Kajganich

Based on: the novel by Camille DeAngelis

Produced by: Luca Guadagnino, Theresa Park, Marco Morabito, David Kajganich, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Lorenzo Mieli, Gabriele Moratti, Peter Spears, Timothée Chalamet

Music by: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, and Mark Rylance

Genre: Thriller

Rating: R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity

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