Stonewall

A group of homosexual people try to live with dignity and self-respect while events build to the opening battle in the major gay rights movement. The fictional story line of Stonewall is framed by a piece of re-created gay history that has been chronicled before, primarily in such documentaries as Before Stonewall and After Stonewall. But here director Nigel Finch constructs a multilayered entertainment set in and around the Stonewall riots of June 1969 (in New York) that marked the start of gay rights and activism. Stonewall is engaging and sympathetic to the plight of gays everywhere, who survived a world where homosexuality was a fate worse than death (and often resulted in it). This is a movie about survival, oppression, and the self-loathing that is inflicted by a world that refuses to understand anything different from mainstream morality. Within that dynamic is a familiar subplot about a young rube, Matty (Fred Weller), who comes from the Midwest to the big city in order to find himself and falls for a drag queen named La Miranda (Guillermo Díaz) in the process. Finch, who died prior to the film's completion (it was finished by producer Christine Vachon), uncovers something joyous in the angst of his characters and in the factual context of material that might have seemed overworked in less committed hands