By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 6/17/24 – Premiering at Frameline 48 on June 27 at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco is a well-told coming-of -age film Riley about a star high-school football player struggling to confront his sexuality and accept who he really is. Benjamin Howard’s debut feature Riley was inspired by his own real-life experience being a high school football player and his own struggle to figure out who he is. As the writer of the script, Howard captures the complexity of adolescent anxieties about sexual identity in the context of the macho athletic world that “jocks” exemplify. The proximity of muscular athletic male bodies in sports is a very real thing and this film captures the raw power of athleticism and sublimated male desire as experienced by the character Riley in this film. Tickets are sold out for the screening on June 27 but there is a Rush Line.
In the film, we follow Dakota Riley (played earnestly by Jake Holley) who is a star high school football player known as a great wide receiver who always seems to score touchdowns for his team. Riley is always under the watchful eye of his father Carson Riley (Rib Hillis) who is also the high school football coach – an ambitious, ex-professional football league player, who was forced to give up playing after a serious sports injury. His father has high expectations for his son Dakota, who has been getting offers of sports scholarships to six universities.
The football team’s quarterback Jayden (played by Colin McCalla) is Riley’s best friend at school, but for some unexplained reason has been kicked out of his mother’s house and is staying at the Riley home and sleeping on the floor in Dakota’s bedroom. Jayden is a sexy, macho roommate who likes to brag out his supposed sexual prowess with high school girls, but how much of his bravado is real is unclear. But Jayden has a body that is clearly desirable, and Dakota cannot figure out the mysterious attraction he feels toward Jayden.
Dakota Riley is a high school success story and has a large group of friends, as well as a close family, and a girlfriend named Skylar (played by Riley Quinn Scott). He’s in control of all areas of his life except one, his sexuality. He’s gay but tries his best to deny it to himself. He maintains a façade with his girlfriend and his friends, and teammates in the locker room, but his youthful raging hormones get in the way, especially when surrounded by his ripped team-mates wearing very little. Dakota manages to find a Grindr hook-up with a local older man (J.B. Waterman) who young Riley revisits several time as his angst over his sexual identity increases. With a fine cast of actors, writer/director Howard lets us experience Riley’s struggle to figure out who and what he really is.
Supported by a kind-hearted and bright girlfriend Skylar, Riley has a sympathetic ear and also a young woman who is really attracted to him. As a high-school senior with his goal set on a university, he is even taking French and in his French class he is seated in pair work next to Liam Hauser (Connor Storrie), a fiercely “out” young man who already knows French and seems quite interested in Riley, although Riley does not know how to “read” him. An incident in the cafeteria at the high school leaves Riley in the Netherlands of emotions, as he usually hangs out with the “jocks” on the football team who taunt Liam about being “gay.” When push comes to shove and an altercation begins, Riley does nothing, and his girlfriend Skylar finds that odd that he cannot be kinder to Liam. This sets the stage for things that happen later in the film.
With a clever script, “Riley” rises above any of the common cliques of coming-of-age films because we get to see the confusion about sexuality that Riley embodies as a character. Being strong and athletic is fine, but that does not determine one’s deeper desires about sexual attraction. All of that nervousness, apprehension and worry is encapsulated by Jake Holley’s performance, he gives a very touching and compellingly natural portrayal as Dakota Riley. He’s a tightly wound ball of anxiety, confusion and it’s all compacted by the expectations from his family, friends and teammates, leaving him adrift and restless. When asked about the inspiration for the film, Benjamin Howard has said that “the hardest part of my coming out process was coming out to myself.”
The center of the film is always Dakota. Despite the predictable homophobic undertones of teenage hazing, the no real hateful or dominating presence. Howard builds a very tense but intimate atmosphere, with a great use of the close-up to reflect Dakota’s feelings of being trapped and labelled. It’s exploring identity and self-acceptance, not necessarily the acceptance of others, as much as that does feed strongly into the character’s motivation. Riley takes a classic coming out story and further explores the idea of identity and labels, showing the fluidity and flexibility of the process of figuring out who you are.
Director Benjamin Howard explains how he came up with this story: “I was 12 years old when I strapped on my first pair of shoulder pads. In high school, I lived a disciplined life as a prep athlete; early morning workouts, pasta dinners with the team, two-a-days in 90° weather. Through it all, a troubling suspicion boiled in me. As it became clearer, that suspicion turned into a clichéd denial.” For those of us who were also high school “jocks,” this all rings true.
Howard elucidates why he wrote the screenplay: “I wrote this film as a way to express what thousands of queer youths are continuing to go through right now. The film aims to shine a light on the coming-out process through a contemporary lens, and to tell the thousands of young, closeted, questioning athletes that they aren’t alone– and that everything is going to be okay.”
Benjamin is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and alum of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. In 2019, his short film Deviant won a Student Emmy Award for its shocking exploration of ex-gay conversion therapy used on queer youth in the 40’s and 50’s. Since its release in 2021, the short has amassed a quarter-million views online. As UCLA, Benjamin’s short film Rendezvous was selected for the esteemed Director’s Spotlight, the yearly collection of the 10 best films to come out of the UCLA film program. Benjamin expanded Rendezvous into Riley, which premiered at festivals in 2023, including BFI Flare Festival in London.
