Though the story tends to drift at times, writer-director Matt Fifer’s realist romance is a tender, watchable indie with subtle comic flourishes
There’s a lot going on in this fervent and cathartically personal movie from writer-director Matt Fifer, in which he himself stars as Ben, a young gay guy in
New York who begins a relationship with Sam, played by Sheldon D Brown. (Brown also contributed personal material to story development, evidently in the form of personal trauma.)
Sam has not come out to his work colleagues or his very religious father Francis (Michael Potts) and Ben has not yet been able to tell his mother Debbie (Sandra Bauleo) that he was abused as a child by his stepfather at their family home in Long Island, where the sound of the cicadas brings back complex, painful memories. So Ben’s suppression has resulted in anxiety and physical symptoms whose psychosomatic origin he has been unable to accept.