Fire Island updates—and playfully rejects—Jane Austen’s hetero-industrial complex
Joel Kim Booster's defiantly different rom-com will delight and disorient queer and straight audiences alike
Film Reviews Fire Island
It doesn’t take long for Fire Island, Joel Kim Booster’s instant-classic Jane Austen riff, to stake its claim in the romantic comedy canon—or rather, defiantly outside of it. Less than a minute into the opening sequence, Booster refers to Pride And Prejudice, his source material, as “hetero nonsense.” As this story’s Lizzie Bennet stand-in, gay Brooklynite Noah continues to narrate: he shudders at the “boyfriend energy” of the naked man in his bed whose name clearly eludes him, then calls his chosen family, the group of friends on their annual Fire Island vacation, the F-word (the one reserved for gays). “Don’t cancel me,” he tells us, tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m reclaiming it!”
Suffice it to say this isn’t your typical rom-com—but then again, how could it be? With all due respect to But I’m A Cheerleader and rather less respect to Love, Simon, queer audiences haven’t seen themselves reflected much in a genre that, at least in its heyday, defined Hollywood’s mainstream and reinforced heteronormative sociocultural standards. Booster and director Andrew Ahn use Austen’s tale of class tension, a romantic comedy urtext, to laugh in the face of such standards, and introduce some new ones. Queer and straight viewers alike may experience Fire Island on Hulu with a mix of delight and disorientation; they haven’t worked the muscles of watching a gay will-they-won’t-they story, let alone one populated by unabashedly out characters.
As much a documentary-like depiction of the titular queer haven as it is a real-deal romantic comedy, Fire Island’s real love letter is to the experience that is Fire Island. LGBTQ+ vacationers from New York City and beyond who have escaped to the little strip of land just off Long Island will feel immersed in its buoyantly liberating, sexually charged paradise, while those who have never visited will feel like they have. Performances from the likes of Bowen Yang and Margaret Cho keep the laughs coming, and Ahn indulges in plenty of swooning romance—just not between his scantily clad star-crossed lovers.
Cinematographer Felipe Vara de Rey captures the island’s utopia, immersing us in lush natural beauty even as well-sculpted arms and torsos crowd every other frame. You can practically smell the sea breeze as Noah and his “sisters” (Yang, Matt Rogers, Tomas Matos, and Torian Miller) arrive by ferry to their summer home away from home. Onlookers in colorful beachwear wave from the docks. A techno-infused cover of “Pure Imagination” kicks off a soundtrack brimming with dance floor euphoria—absolute bops, all.
At the Fire Island Pines home of this makeshift family’s lesbian matriarch, Erin (the wonderful Cho), Noah resolves to steer Howie (Yang) away from lovey-dovey monogamy and toward getting laid. As the week progresses and the gang navigates the island’s party circuit, Howie follows his heart to genial doctor Charlie (James Scully) while Noah targets mysterious hunk Dex (Zane Phillips)—but both are deterred by uptight lawyer Will (Conrad Ricamora), who’s staying in a fancier house down the beach with Charlie and their judgmental friends.
Anyone even remotely familiar with Pride And Prejudice, or Bridget Jones’s Diary for that matter, can guess what happens next. Booster finds clever ways to transpose modern-day dating norms onto Austen’s conflicts between class and romance; if knavish George Wickham were alive today, he probably would indeed be exploiting hookups on OnlyFans. And just because Fire Island is a utopia doesn’t mean it’s not in America; Noah and Howie’s identities as gay Asian men carry compelling tensions, both explicit and unspoken. Contrasting their low-income, diverse, and flamboyant gaggle of personalities with Charlie and Will’s rich, mostly white, and utterly basic clique lets Booster make shrewd points about what’s considered desirable in the queer and especially gay male communities. “Race, masculinity, abs—just a few of the metrics we use to separate ourselves into upper and lower classes,” Noah quips helpfully to viewers who may not be familiar with the casual bigotry found on gay dating apps.
Those asides yield mixed results, and you can occasionally feel a strain between the film audience that Booster is addressing, even educating, and the one seeing themselves represented onscreen. For the former, a PowerPoint-style lecture presents the history of tea dances. Luckily for the latter, there’s a level of niche pop-culture fluency that anyone who’s watched Yang’s work on Saturday Night Live might expect (Ahn brilliantly lets his cast of comedians pack throwaway jokes and references, many clearly improvised, into every kiki—just wait for the heated game of Heads Up!). Most delightful of Booster-as-Noah’s narrations is a detailed explanation of various party drugs and illustrations of their effects.
Yang can’t help but steal scenes like that one; it’s what he does best. Here’s hoping we’re at only the beginning of his Hollywood takeover. The same goes for Booster, here infusing the acerbic observations typical of his stand-up work into both a character learning the value of vulnerability and a story that strikes the right balance between bitter and sweet. There aren’t quite as many sparks flying as there could be between him and Ricamora as this tale’s Mr. Darcy. But the latter proves so adept at teasing out the character’s charms that by the time he’s doing the classic awkward-public-dance-as-big-romantic-gesture trope, we can project our own infatuation with the guy onto the screen. It seems Ahn, who directed poignant performances from Hong Chau and the late Brian Dennehy in 2020’s Driveways, is equally suited for a cast that isn’t afraid to do something as silly as count down the sunset, screaming numbers and fractions of numbers with glee.
It’s that kind of joy that separates Fire Island from any of its cinematic predecessors. Rom-coms are fantasies, especially summer rom-coms as dreamily sun-soaked as this one. Queer audiences might feel another layer of fantasy watching this film, with its specificity-is-universal approach and sumptuous portrayal of the ultimate safe space—one entirely free of straight people, which Billy Eichner’s upcoming studio comedy Bros promises as well. Fire Island will be released at the beginning of a fraught Pride Month, amid waves of regressive politics targeting LGBTQ+ youth, not to mention anti-Asian hate and the reckonings of discrimination within discriminated communities that Booster is poking at. What better timing, Hollywood seems to be saying, for an escapist rom-com that’s out and proud? Certainly, if a golden age of gay cinema is finally entering the mainstream, Booster’s brand of wit and fuck-you defiance is sorely needed in the mix.
60 Comments
Aw, look at you and your darling little man-panties.
Instant Classic = B+
Instant Classic … B+.
I made the same comment. Hyperbole is the language of modern criticism. New releases are met with a crash of writers, desperate to be the first to name some soon forgotten movie/album/show an “instant classic.” This is the same website that just yesterday, praised a band for knowing how to use a ride cymbal.
I hate-read the articles anymore. Luckily the comments are still 60% fun/interesting/insightful. Loads more lurkers here nowadays that like to try and put people on blast than there used to be.
The review for Joker tore that movie apart and gave it a B-So according to AVClub, this movie is a LITTLE better than Joker.
It wouldn’t take much.
I mean Joker did kinda suck.
I’ve never found Bowen Yang to make me laugh. I also always think of Alex Strangelove when I consider recent good rom-coms, not Love, Simon. I wish more people would talk about Alex Strangelove so I can gab away.I am maybe not the target audience for this movie, which is fine.But hello, Zane Phillips!
looks like a good flick but neither of these dudes are very funny and we all know it. Also calling a movie an “instant classic” even though you gave it a “B+” is hysterically cringe. Don’t worry, no one is gonna think you’re a homophobe.
I don’t find the grade and the quote to be incongruous. A film can be (or become) a classic due to its rewatch-ability and (projected) cultural impact and yet be a good, not great, movie on its strictly cinematic merits: maybe the direction is unimaginative or a few performances mediocre. Plenty of ‘classics’ – especially comedies – are good, but not great movies: their imperfection becomes part of their charm.I think Yang to be hilarious but I’ve never warmed to Booster’s material.
“I think Yang to be hilarious”Based on your obnoxious and humorless comment response, this is not surprising.
A film can be (or become) a classic due to its rewatch-ability and (projected) cultural impact and yet be a good, not great, movie on its strictly cinematic meritsCertainly films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High fit this mold.
All criticism here now is first and foremost cultural criticism. There was absolutely no way in hell this movie would get anything other than a very positive review.
What do you think cultural means? All reviews of any piece of media is inherently “cultural”
I think the criticism exileonmystreet is making is that many reviews here seem to focus less on whether the film is good and more on how the film fits in to endless political/cultural fights. Take, for example, this review of Turning Redhttps://www.avclub.com/turning-red-delivers-a-timely-message-as-it-tackles-a-t-1848615494I actually didn’t find this review to be especially egregious, maybe because it doesn’t seem here that the author is fixating on these political/cultural topics. These issues are probably unavoidable when talking about a gay retelling of Pride & Prejudice.
AVC gave a D to a queer show like 11 days ago.
Racist homophobe!!(I say this tongue in cheek, as a fan of both Bowen Yang and Joel Kim Booster. Also agree with the other person that B+ isn’t that bad, I don’t think it’s pandering or whatever you crusaders against wokeness perceive it to be. The grades being sort of arbitrary are a classic AV Club phenomenon.)
This may be news to you: comedy is subjective and a lot of classic movies are not very good movies.Have you seen this movie so that you have some basis in deciding that in praising it, the writer must be pandering? Or has it occurred to you that opinions on the quality of any given movie may vary?
I really liked this title and premise and was eager to check it out. And I honestly couldn’t even get through the trailer. BROS, on the other hand, (despite the much worse title) looks hilarious.
the funniest thing in that trailer was margaret cho, and i can’t stand her.
I was excited for the movie based on the cast and premise but also thought the trailer made it look corny. Watched last night though and really enjoyed it. It’s a little awkward in the first 15-30 minutes or so, I think partly because of a heavy reliance on voiceover exposition to establish the characters, but then they dial it back and the romances and emotional/social dynamics explored are quite compelling. And it’s pretty funny too. Give it a shot!
A lot of stand up I get bored in, but Joel’s I always listen the whole way through. He’s a good storyteller just on the stage alone, so I don’t doubt he can tell a good story through the medium of a movie with people acting out his stories. and I think the rating system on indies is always different not just on this site, but in a lot of our own personal systems too.
Pride and Prejudice is one of my favourite novels. Not because of the romance, but because it’s about money (and very cynically so). I’m skeptical of most adaptations because they seem to go too far in the pure romance direction, but this sounds like it might get the money aspect right.
I really like that P&P manages to be very romantic while also grappling with the practical realities that marriage is also a financial arrangement. And what that can mean to different people and different marriages.
Several years ago there was a web series modern adaptation called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. The Darcy, Bingley and Wickham characters were still romantic partners but Collins was a prospective employee offering Lizzie a secure job at his company that she was morally diffident about. She was shocked when she learned friend Charlotte accepted it after she declined, but acknowledged Charlotte had a point when she said jobs don’t exactly grow on trees, she had a shitload of student debt, and doing the hard yards now in something she didn’t love might give her the means to pursue her dreams later. It made me think that a more culturally resonant modern adaptation of P&P *would* arguably have the protagonist conflicted between various career choices not romantic relationships.
Ooh, fun, lets come up with what jobs they would be! I feel like Jane’s ‘Bingley’ career choice would be ‘Art teacher at a nice prep school,’ with Lizzie bugging her to try to make it as an artist instead.
Here’s how in-tune I am with queer culture – I could’ve sworn Fire Island was in the Caribbean. I should probably watch this movie so my LGBTQ+ friends don’t snicker at me.
lotta dorks in the comments!
Feel free to elaborate. There is a reason that everyone thinks the quality of the writing on this site has massively plummeted over the last few years.
B+. instant classic.
It’s an online comment thread. Dorks is a given.
Then why did I have to register with CoolGuy.com?
All your money is now gone.
Did I miss when we turned against Love, Simon? I distinctly remember everyone cheering that movie on at the time.
If Wickham were around today, wouldn’t he be a creep hanging out around high schools?
The trailer looked promising so I’m glad to hear it lived up. I like Bowen Yang but suspect he has more range than being constantly cranked up like on SNL.For gay romcoms it’s a shame Jeffrey didn’t have a more lasting presence. When it came out a lot of us saw it for Patrick Stewart and rewatched it for the love stories. It would be interesting to examine if it’s aged well but I would bet it has. Seeing adults with wants and needs navigate love against a deadly disease feels timely.
I didn’t see that until the early 2000’s, thought I was aware of it’s reputation from the beginning.It’s very ‘80s/’90s New York, and for that, it’s a bit of a curio but fine. Considerimg what living with HIV/AIDS is like now and with PrEP and all, it might make Jeffrey-the-character look bad.
Not to be too grim, here, but Jeffrey didn’t have a lasting presence because the culture it depicts and the people it portrays are dead. In sociological terms, AIDS created a “cohort effect,” among gay men aged 25–44 years during the epidemic’s peak (1987–1996). It destroyed their social networks then, and basically altered the entire course of personal and social lives during and after the epidemic. It’s why there are so few gay men “of a certain age” in urban centers these days, and as they went, so went the scenes.People forget, they just do. The reality of attending three or four funerals a week for years rapidly fades away, because in all likelihood, eventually one of those funerals would be yours. There are very few left to tell the stories, now.I’m actually surprised to see a movie like Fire Island today; I thought that Fire Island (the scene) was just gone or altered almost beyond recognition, like Provincetown, Key West, or SOMA in San Francisco. I’ll be interested to see what this modern portrait looks like.As far as aging well – Jeffrey will always be a movie adapted by the playwright from his own stage play, which is peculiar amber to be preserved in. That said, I get a nostalgia hit from it, and I’ve got no idea what a modern first-time viewer would think of it, especially one who is – as so many are, these days – unaware of the history.
Well said (though I admit I’m not quite sure what being adapted from a play by its playwright really plays into whether the film holds up or not—certainly that’s true of a number of films based on plays). I first saw it when I was 12 in the 90s—knew I was gay but of course I wasn’t out. At the time, I admit, I was terrified of AIDS and it seemed like most of the gay portrayals I saw were about that (understandably given the times—although I also think mentally I was just so worried about it—and had had a close family friend who had committed suicide after getting brain cancer connected to HIV—that I may have exaggerated in my mind just how often I saw it depicted). But I have a lot of affection for the movie and it has some of Paul Rudnick’s funnier lines.
does it pass the Bechdel test?
Well, in a movie about gay people trying to get it on, I’d guess that any two women sharing the screen are unlikely to be talking about men. So, technically it probably does pass the Bechdel test?
Really looking forward to this movie, and it’s nice to see more queer films populated by actual queer actors (Boys in the Band, this, Bros).Speaking of, Bros is claiming to be the first rom-com written by a queer person and starring all queer actors. Does Fire Island beat them by being released earlier? Or maybe not everyone in Fire Island is queer (or out)? Just curious, if anyone knows.
I read the claim as Bros will be the first LGBT-cast romantic comedy from a major studio, Universal. I’d guess that Fire Island (Searchlight) and others have been from indie or boutique studios so they don’t quite fit, but it’s kind of an arbitrary distinction.
That makes sense. Thanks!
Bros is marketed as the first produced rom-com on the level of other Apatow films too which is true, and one where they don’t feel they have to sanitize queerdom for hetero audiences. Fucking tired of movies acting like us queers are just heteros who “love is love”, it dismisses so much of the culture.
I am a very gay man from NYC who can’t stand Fire Island and has been unimpressed by Booster thus far. Which is a shame, because we need more gay romantic comedies–just not ones that make a virtue out of the bitchiness and narcissism of New York gays in budgie smugglers. I’ll probably still see it eventually but in the meantime I’ll wait for one set in Provincetown, which is by far the superior gay summer mecca.
Having vacationed in P-town but not Fire Island, I’m really wondering whether Boston gays in budgie smugglers are really that much better in the bitchiness and narcissism departments.
Oh, there are plenty of narcissistic bitches in budgie smugglers there, too, no doubt. But there are significant differences between the locales that makes P-Town vastly more pleasant to vacation at, IMO. For one thing, there are actually things to do BESIDES getting wasted and having sex with random people; I have nothing against either of those activities but when they are the only things you can do it gets tedious unless you are a tedious person—and that’s all you can do in Fire Island. There is no art or real theater or culture or literary history, there’s very little scenery, and the restaurants are worse. It’s also cheaper in P-Town, once you get there. I’d rather stay in a quaint B&B by myself there, even in the off season, than share a place with four other people on weekends at a higher price on the Island (which doesn’t even have an off-season, really).And for all the narcissistic bitches that make their way to P-Town there is still a wider diversity of types, ages, and people who aren’t simply twinks or people who aren’t twinks but still imagine themselves to be.Of course, the final thing that makes it more appealing to me may be the same thing that would make FI appealing to you—it’s different people. Above all else I have never understood the appeal of spending a fortune to go someplace and see the exact same people you know and don’t especially like the rest of the year, but in bathing suits. If they’re boring in NYC the bathing suits in FI don’t make them any less boring.
Yes, nothing says “I’m tired of the bitchiness and narcissism of NYC gays” like going on at length about the superiority of your preferred vacation spot.
Bless your heart.
No mention of Saving Face or The Half of It? They’re great.
Looks like a woke genZ tire fire…. B+ instant classic!
What do you mean by woke?
It only means what it means to you. How should I address you by the way, what do you prefer.
To all the fools in the comments saying “uhhhh how can a B+ be an instant classic???”
B+ is one of the highest grades possible to give at the AV Club (I guess the equivalent would be 4 stars out of 5) – seems pretty easy to think that a 4 star rom-com could be considered an instant classic within the genre! Especially one that treads somewhat new ground.
The Irishman got an A- and was listed as the number one movie for its year of release. Once Upon A Time in Hollywood got a B+. Burning got an A-.
So can everyone please stop being so annoying and pedantic???
Also I get that identity-based movie criticism is an annoying trend but I do think the author did a good job of dissecting the movie in addition to speaking to the (relevant) identity aspects of it. This looks like a fun movie!
Uh, gay people make up about 5% of the U.S. population though it seems like 10% with all the noise they’re making and you want an explosion of this stuff in cinema? Where’s the explosion in POC cinema as we (I’m Hispanic) wait? Instead we get another Asian movie where they all look alike as usual. Who can tell them apart? How do they do it? Maybe that’s how Chinese commie leaders keep control, the collective! Worker bees with no identity! Our planet is burning, spare me your pathetic crisis and go save the planet. Your problems disappear if your have no planet. Get to work!
Really looking forward to this. i’m a big reader of the las culturistas podcast, so big fans of Yang and Rogers.
I feel like this reviewer hasn’t seen much gay cinema. Most of the quality films are indies or (more so) from other countries. The rare gay studio films are bland and watered down for the masses (e.g. In & Out). I’m looking forward to seeing this but I hope it isn’t played too broad.
‘Twas good. It was fun how they adapted P&P to fit the setting/culture/modern day and the character equivalents here carry the torch well. I was especially impressed with Bowen Yang’s dramatic work as the Jane, he was charming and sympathetic as the lovelorn romantic. The dynamics between the characters and the implications about classism, racism, homophobia, and general snobbery within the gay community were well done too. There’s some clunky moments that don’t quite work but “B+ classic” is spot on imo. Minor quibble, I don’t really get the comment in the review that people will find the movie “disorienting.” This feels weirdly close to criticism of something being “unrelatable” because it doesn’t center mainstream narratives. I know that doesn’t seem to be what the writer is implying and he is giving it credit for its representation but felt odd.