Benjamin Howard, who wrote and directed the film Riley, says it’s based on his own struggle with his sexuality as a US high school football player.
But to my mind this angst-ridden drama doesn’t quite score the points it should. It opens enigmatically with a pretty male teenager – Dakota Riley – hooking up with a much older sex worker in an isolated countryside house. It’s a promising start, as we learn the teen is a footballer, but soon the rough treatment he receives makes him back off and become shouty. It’s not a good omen for him or us.
Immediately we cut to the rigours of football training, with its homoerotic undertones – the toxic masculinity of the locker room, homophobia, insecurity and latent anger and violence.
It could be a heady mix, but somehow we really don’t sympathise with Dakota as he seeks to understand his homosexuality and hide it from team-mates, family and aspiring girlfriend.
He’s exasperating and though clearly into male porn on his phone, keeps telling anyone who will listen that he doesn’t know who he really is.
Added complication comes from his football coach, who is his ex-footballer father, forced to go into coaching after an injury cut short his possibly glittering career. Dakota doesn’t want to just be “Carson’s kid”, but his rebellion is like all his other actions, rather tame.
It’s an interesting theme that Howard explores, but the emotional arc of Dakota’s journey to self-realisation doesn’t seem to be in his own hands. The hooker and the girlfriend are his guides. And the girlfriend’s grandma’s saying “the fullest life is lived in truth”, is the one axiom he eventually seems to be prepared to follow.
Jake Holley, though 10 years older than his character, is totally convincing as the muscular teen with pretty boy looks, who gets involved in soft porn situations with the class gay during “French lessons”, and with his best team buddy, with whom he shares a bedroom and midnight sexual fantasies.
Surprisingly for a film about football, we don’t really see any play, but I guess that might be for budgetary reasons. Instead this is an intimately filmed psychological game of the mind, and worth a viewing despite my reservations.
Riley is being screened at the BFI LGBTQ+ Flare Film Festival, which opens this week. For screenings CLICK HERE
