indie

In 1997, the comedy “In & Out” did its shiny, star-studded best to mainstream the story of a closeted gay man in a rock-ribbed American community embracing his truth. The fine new indie drama “Plainclothes,” which takes place in 1997 in Syracuse, N.Y., and centers on a young police officer in the throes of desire, wants to remind us that the reality of such reckonings was a bit more fraught.

In first-time screenwriter-director Carmen Emmi’s tense, sensitively threaded scenario, fresh-faced cop Lucas (Tom Blyth) isn’t just holding a secret — he’s involved in the enforced criminalization of it. His assigned undercover detail is the mall, using a seductive look (not entirely acting) to lure gay men to the restroom, silently clocking the moment they meet the minimum requirement for breaking indecent exposure laws, then having them arrested.

Something shifts inside Lucas during one of these stings, however, when he locks eyes with a target named Andrew (Russell Tovey), whose soulful return gaze promises a deeper connection than instant gratification. He spares Andrew the planned indignity waiting outside, but secures a phone number away from the watchful eye of his sergeant (Christian Cooke). Weeks later, the pair arrange to meet in the upstairs balcony of an old movie palace. (Though we never see the screen, sharp-eared film buffs will recognize allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance classic “The Conversation.”) After a couple of warm, intimate exchanges in secluded spaces, Lucas allows himself to imagine a future free from hiding, even if Andrew cautions that what they have can only ever be temporary.

Early in “Plainclothes,” thanks to changes in aspect ratio and Lucas’ facial hair, we realize that this timeline amounts to an extended memory, triggered in the present scenes by tense New Year’s Eve preparations at Lucas’ childhood home and a misplaced letter that he hopes neither his adoring, recently widowed mother (a wonderful Maria Dizzia) nor his obnoxious, hot-headed uncle (Gabe Fazio) find.

The backward-forward structure creates entwined tracks of suspense between the outcome of the Andrew relationship and the expected ramifications of what’s assumed to be a revealing letter. That framework gives “Plainclothes” the feeling of an emotional chase film where pursuer and pursued are the same, stuck in a loop of possibility, torn about what being caught really means.

Emmi’s well-conceived screenplay does justice to the ways a compartmentalized life can crack. When Lucas is with Andrew — and even in scenes with a nice ex-girlfriend (Amy Forsyth) — acceptance is palpable, understanding real. Among family, the pressure to conform activates his guardedness. And when his department, steeped in macho culture and eager for more mall arrests, starts deploying a video camera behind a one-way mirror, an increasingly anxious Lucas is made to feel nothing but risk about his identity.

There may be little that’s psychologically fresh about “Plainclothes,” but the fact that its low-key, close-framed style suggests a taut, moody gay indie you might have seen in the ’90s works in its favor. It’s also well cast, with the appealing Blyth always in control of the undercurrents, especially alongside the excellent Tovey, playing a sadder, wiser closetedness. I wish Emmi hadn’t overegged the visual motif that Lucas’ POV in moments of stress is akin to the fuzzy texture of Hi8 video: A little of it goes a long way and too often pulls us out of the tone in a room. But it’s the kind of choice that’s easier to forgive in a movie so well-attuned to shifts in perception, one that dimensionalizes the problem of achieving clarity when leading a double life.

Henry Jaglom, the uncompromising indie filmmaker who eschewed big-budget operations in order to preserve his creative vision, died Monday night. He was 87.

Jaglom died at his Santa Monica home surrounded by his family, his daughter Sabrina Jaglom said. The writer-director, whose filmography includes “Last Summer in the Hamptons” and “Eating,” was known for his intimate, naturalistic style and foregrounding of women’s stories in his work.

Sabrina, also a director, said in a statement that her father was “larger-than-life, and made the world a lot more colorful for those of us lucky enough to know him.”

“But, most of all, he was the most loving and supportive Dad. He will be greatly missed, but impossible to forget,” she said Thursday.

From his earliest directing gigs, Jaglom was committed to creating autobiographically inspired and emotionally resonant stories with as little studio intervention as possible. He kept costs low, cast his friends and family in his movies and pursued an improvisational production style that preceded the early-2000s film genre mumblecore.

“My movies talk about the emotional side of life,” Jaglom told The Times in 2009.

“I just try to have people do what we do, which is sit around, talk, deal with the emotions of life,” he said. “It can be touching, sad, happy, but it allows people to go through some of what they go through in life and not feel isolated and lonely.”

Jaglom’s 1985 film, “Always,” in which he co-starred with his ex-wife Patrice Townsend, was inspired by the disintegration of the couple’s own relationship. Jaglom and Townsend divorced two years before the film’s release.

Nearly a decade later, conversations Jaglom had with his second wife, actor Victoria Foyt, about parenthood were distilled into 1994’s “Babyfever,” which the couple wrote, directed and Foyt starred in.

Former Times staff writer Chris Willman called the comedy-drama “remarkable in its comprehensive documentary aspects.”

“Jaglom is, as always, big on verite and improvisation; with such a large cast milling about the airy, oceanside house, he’s managed to cover just about every conceivable baby base, with sentiments ranging from banal self-interest to self-conscious belly laughs, and a lot of very real, undeniably affecting poignancy in-between,” Willman wrote in his review of the film.

“Babyfever” was lauded for sincerely engaging with topics affecting women and for starring a mostly female cast — both of which were trademarks for Jaglom, who went on to form a women’s arm to HHH Rainbow Productions, his production company with producers Howard Zucker and Henry Lange, which for many years was located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.

“Women are the most disenfranchised people in this business,” he told The Times in 1987. “They still have to play mostly by men’s rules. And as I’ve been successfully making million-dollar movies for some time now I thought: ‘Why can’t they do it too?’”

Jaglom was a mentee and close confidant of acclaimed filmmaker and actor Orson Welles, whose farewell performance came in Jaglom’s 1987 comedy “Someone to Love,” which screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

“He plays himself, shedding even the persona he adopted for TV talk shows,” Jaglom told The Times of Welles’ acting style in the film. “People will finally get to see him the way I knew him; it’s almost as if he was sitting there having lunch with you.”

Peter Biskind compiled conversations between the longtime friends for his popular 2013 book, “My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.”

Several people approached Jaglom about publishing the tapes before Biskind came knocking, the director told The Times in 2013. But Biskind was the first one he took seriously.

“I said, ‘You want to put yourself through all this?’” Jaglom said. “And he said, ‘Yeah, on the one condition that you don’t censor me.’”

Jaglom, born in London in 1938, was the child of Jewish parents who immigrated to England to escape Nazi persecution. Later, Jaglom’s family moved to New York, where Jaglom spent his formative years and returned after attending the University of Pennsylvania.

In New York, Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, acting in and directing off-Broadway theater and cabaret before moving to Hollywood in the late 1960s. The multihyphenate went on to make his directorial debut in 1971 with “A Safe Place,” which starred Wells and Jack Nicholson.

After finding commercial success with his third film, “Sitting Ducks” (1980), Jaglom told The Times in 1987 that he was pitched by several big-time studio heads who said, “‘When you’re ready to make a serious movie, a big movie, come and see me.’”

“I said: ‘If you love my films why would you want me to come and make one of your big ones?’” Jaglom said, adding that with a large studio at the helm, directors run the risk of ceding the “final cut.”

“As far as I’m concerned all the big stars and fancy limos and fine dressing rooms aren’t worth a thing if you don’t control your film creatively,” he said.

For years, Henry ate at the same cafe on Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue. He was always delighted when fans and aspiring filmmakers stopped to say hello.

In addition to Sabrina, Jaglom is survived by a son, Simon Jaglom, and ex-wives Townsend and Foyt, Sabrina and Simon’s mother.

“How the f— does this baby know if she loves her father?” asked River Gallo one day at Walmart, back in 2010, when they saw an infant sucking on a pacifier emblazoned with the words “I love my daddy.”

“That started the ball rolling about my own issues with my father and with this compulsory love that we have with our families, specifically with our parents, specifically in this instance with my father, her father, our fathers, and with masculinity in general,” says a radiant Gallo during a recent video interview.

The spontaneous moment of introspection planted the seed for what became a 10-minute performance piece while studying acting at NYU — then their USC thesis-turned-short film “Ponyboi,” released in 2017, which Gallo wrote, starred in, and co-directed with Sadé Clacken Joseph. That project ultimately evolved into “Ponyboi” the feature, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024, became the first film produced under Fox Entertainment Studios’ indie label, Tideline, and was released June 27 in theaters across the United States.

A consummate multihyphenate, Gallo again wrote the screenplay, served as producer and stars as the titular character: an intersex, Latine sex worker in New Jersey who is desperate to escape their pimp (played by Dylan O’Brien) and the world of crime and violence that surrounds them.

Flashbacks to Ponyboi’s childhood, made difficult due to the medical procedures forced on them and the temperament of their classically macho Latino father, fill in the viewer on the protagonist’s past. Meanwhile, dreamy sequences with a handsome, cowboy hat-wearing stranger named Bruce (Murray Bartlett), an idealized embodiment of a positive masculinity, construct a rich world both visually and thematically in Ponyboi’s present.

“[At] face value, ‘Ponyboi’ can seem like, ‘Oh, it’s just a person-on-the-run kind of movie,’ but upon a closer look, it’s about someone finding freedom in the acceptance of their past and the possibility that, through transcending their own beliefs about themselves, perhaps their future could be a little brighter,” Gallo explains.

Gallo is the child of Salvadoran immigrants who escaped their country’s civil war in 1980 and lived undocumented in the U.S. Gallo grew up in New Jersey and showed interest in acting from an early age. It was a strict teacher’s unexpected encouragement, after Gallo appeared in a musical during their sophomore year of high school, that convinced them to pursue a life in art.

“My biology teacher, Mrs. Lagatol, came to see my musical, and the next day I was waiting for her to say something to me, and she didn’t say anything,” Gallo recalls. “Then she gave me back a test, and on the test was a little Post-it that said: ‘If you had been the only one on stage, it would’ve been worth the price of admission. Bravo.’”

Gallo still keeps that Post-it note framed.

Though their parents were supportive, Gallo admits feeling frustration in recent years that their family has not fully understood the magnitude of what they’ve accomplished as a marginalized person in entertainment: an intersex individual and a first-generation Latine.

“Not to toot my own horn, but for a graduate of any film program, getting your first feature to Sundance is the biggest deal in the world,” says Gallo. “There hasn’t been a person like me to do what I’m doing. There’s no precedent or pioneer in my specific identities.”

This desire for a more informed validation is even stronger in relation to their father.

“I don’t think my dad has seen any of my films. My mom has; she was at the premiere at Sundance, which was really beautiful, and so was my sister,” Gallo says. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad never sees my movies. That’s hard, but he’s supportive in other ways.”

Halfway through our conversation, Gallo realizes they are wearing a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. That’s no coincidence, since “The Boss,” a fellow New Jerseyan, influenced multiple aspects of “Ponyboi.” As they wrote the screenplay for the short version, Gallo was also reading Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born to Run,” and that seeped into their work.

“I remember taking a trip to the Jersey Shore that summer and then looking up at the Stone Pony, the venue where [Springsteen] had his first big performance, and just being like, ‘Stone pony, stone pony, pony, pony, pony boy, ponyboi. That’s a good name.’ And then that was just what I decided to name the character”

For Gallo, the emblematic American singer-songwriter represents “the idea of being working class,” which Gallo thinks “transcends political ideology.” As a child of immigrants, Springsteen’s work speaks to Gallo profoundly.

“My dad, who is more dark-skinned than me, was an electrician, and he was a union guy who experienced all this racism in New York unions,” Gallo says. “There’s so much of what I see in Bruce Springsteen in my father and also just in how Bruce Springsteen describes his relationship with his dad, who was also a man who couldn’t express his emotions.”

For the feature, Gallo enlisted Esteban Arango, a Colombian-born, L.A.-based filmmaker whose debut feature, “Blast Beat,” premiered at Sundance in 2020.

But while Gallo believes Arango understood the nuances of the narrative, it admittedly pained them to relinquish the director’s chair. But it was a necessary sacrifice in order to focus on the performance and move the project along.

“It was difficult because I went to school for directing,” Gallo explains. “But I just don’t think the movie would’ve happened on this timeline if I had wanted to direct it. It would’ve taken much longer, and we needed the film at this moment in time.”

Arango brought his own “abrasive” edge to the narrative. “I felt the story needed more darkness,” the director explains via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “The hypermasculine world of New Jersey is constantly trying to oppress and reject Ponyboi, because they have a much softer, feminine energy they want to project.”

The contrast between the tenderness of Ponyboi’s interiority and the harshness of their reality is what Arango focused on.

Though Arango hesitated to take on the film, given that he is not queer, his personal history as an immigrant functioned as an entry point into this tale of shifting, complex identities. Still, throughout the entire process, Arango was clear that, first and foremost, “Ponyboi” was a story centering intersex people — and all those who don’t fit into the rigid gender binary.

“Their plight should be our plight, because they are at the forefront of what it means to be free,” he says. “When somebody attacks them or doesn’t understand why they present themselves as they are, it’s really an attack on all of us, and it’s a reflection of our misunderstanding of ourselves.”

Back in 2023, Gallo was one of three subjects in Julie Cohen’s incisive documentary “Every Body,” about the intersex experience, including the ways the medical industry performs unnecessary procedures in order to “normalize” intersex people.

Gallo confesses that for a long time they thought being intersex was something they would never feel comfortable talking about — something they even would take “to the grave,” as they put it.

“There’s no other way that I can explain the fact that now I’ve made so much work reflecting on my identity other than it being an act of God,” Gallo says. “Because I just had the feeling that the world needed it now, and also that I needed it now. I’m glad that ‘Ponyboi’ taught me about the agency that I have over my art and myself and my life.”

Anti-trans legislation, Gallo explains, includes loopholes enabling doctors to “normalize” intersex bodies and continue the medically unnecessary, and at times nonconsensual surgeries on intersex youth. “The intersex narrative in [trans legislation] is invisible and not spoken about enough,” they say. “These are also anti-intersex bills.”

To fully understand Gallo as a person and an artist, one should watch both “Every Body” and “Ponyboi.” The doc shows the bones of what made Gallo who they are without symbols, just the raw facts of how their intersex identity shaped them. “Ponyboi,” on the other hand, exposes their interior life with the poetry that the cinematic medium allows for.

However, what happens with “Ponyboi” now isn’t as important to Gallo as the fact that the movie exists as a testament of their totality as a creative force.

“Love my movie, hate my movie, I don’t care, because my movie healed something deep inside of me that I was waiting a lifetime to be healed from,” Gallo states fervently. “Intersex people are still invisible in this culture, but I can at least say that I don’t feel invisible to myself anymore. And it was all worth it for that.”