April 2, 2003

Partners in crime
reinvents the buddy system. By Lynn Rapoport

By Hook or by Crook

'WHEN I WAS a kid, I used to want to fly," a handsome, sweet-faced loner named Shy announces at the start of By Hook or by Crook, a story of charming outcasts, petty grift, phone calls to strangers, and the kind of friendship that might save you from yourself.

Shy's voice hovers above a young Superman posed in a doorway in a home movie, the sun's glare leaving a light across the kid's face. Nearer the present, Shy (played by Tribe 8's Silas Howard, who cowrote, codirected, and stars in the film with writer-performer Harry Dodge) stands in the same doorway, watching nothing much come across the sky, then walks back inside. "Right about here," the voice-over tells us, "I just wanted to jump." Superman's long gone, and Shy seems to be wondering where he disappeared to.

Some of the best moments in By Hook or by Crook are like this – not so much scenes as thoughts thrown away, memories caught by Super 8 footage and the clicking of a camera shutter, narrated and threaded together by Shy's one-liners and observations. The landscape of Hoxie, Kan., stands still. Freight trains leave town. The credits end in a gloomy, faded, slow-motion shot of Shy standing half-posed, half-uncomfortable, life falling apart in threads.

A young genderbent butch (Shy answers "both" when asked by kids on the street, but the filmmakers and most of the characters choose the male pronoun) living in a small, empty-looking town and trying to get past the death of his father, Shy's come to the end of some rope or other. The opening credits resemble home movies, but his life seems pretty lonely and silent, like there's no one around to hold the camera. Everything's gone or going pretty wrong. The car won't start, the house is being repossessed, and the bills are so unlikely to be paid that he just burns them over the sink.

The freight trains leaving town clearly have the right idea, and it's only a matter of time before Shy (inspired by an evening-news segment involving Joan Jett) is headed out too, to California, dressed in a natty suit and a pair of shoes no one can stay away from. The country rushes by, the lights of a casino blur and vanish, a man wearing a cowboy hat stares at Shy from the front seat of a car, then breaks into the strangest smile.

By Hook or by Crook (which has traveled the festival circuit, including a sold-out, standing-ovation night at the Castro Theatre during the 2001 Frameline fest and a trip to Sundance) has road-movie moments but is more caught up in thoughts of vertical motion. Shy seems drawn to heights – stacked pallets in a rail yard, the rooftop of an SRO. The idea appears to be that you need people there to catch you, or to put you back down on the ground, something Shy finds out, naturally, in San Francisco, where freaks of all dispositions, talents, tendencies, and genders head in search of new families to stop them from falling.

This is where Dodge comes in, as Valentine, who's a beautiful mess in his own right, a fruitcake, in his own words: time spent in a mental institution probably didn't help – his adopted family stuck him there for wanting to dress outside his gender assignment. He learned to impersonate normalcy badly and men, he says, pretty well. He stops at phone booths and collects the white pages, compulsively looking up names and numbers, women who might be his birth mother, who gave him away when he was a baby girl named Wendy.

The film changes when he shows up. The collage of Shy's loneliness and memories makes way for rooftop gunplay, criminal activity, and other forms of male bonding, not excluding a brawl, a chase scene, drunken philosophical exchanges at dive bars, and an eventual brush with the law. Which sounds like standard buddy/action flick fare, but nothing on that list plays out quite the way you'd think.

There's not much of a plotline, which might occur to you by the end and make you wonder what you just sat through. The action here is mostly a vehicle for Shy and Valentine's friendship, and the film's strength lies in their interactions. Dodge is amazing, presenting Valentine's psychological distress in a way that's sweet and funny and terrible, leaving Howard's Shy to play straight man, charming grifter, and tender protector to Valentine's chaotic poetry slam artist.

Valentine has some of the best dialogue, including, for instance, when he tells his lady friend, Billie (Stanya Kahn), in the heat of the moment, "I get so excited being by you, I feel like I'm gonna bust, like I gotta run across the yard." That line keeps me from wishing he and Shy could have had the whole movie to themselves. But nothing in By Hook or by Crook, including their romantic interests, quite matches up to what happens when Dodge and Howard are both in the shot. Billie, whose dialogue is the work of performer-writer Kahn, is inconsistent in a way that echoes Valentine's shifting degrees of lucidity but sometimes feels more like Kahn wasn't sure how to play it. Isabelle (Carina Gia), the woman Shy courts at the speed of rock formation, disappears for huge chunks of the movie. No doubt Shy's commitment issues are partly to blame, but it's awkwardly and unevenly handled. Still, if the filmmakers haven't gotten far with this relationship problem, one that afflicts buddy pictures the world over, they have solved others in a way that's lovely and strange and beautifully real.