Cowboys review: A compassionate, sweetly realised drama about the trans experience

Dir: Anna Kerrigan. Starring: Steve Zahn, Jillian Bell, Sasha Knight, Ann Dowd. 15, 86 mins

Cowboys opens with a familiar, and distinctly American, image – that of father and son, out roaming an untamed wilderness of Montana. They’re play-acting some form of masculine mythology. Troy (Steve Zahn), the elder, and Joe (Sasha Knight), the younger, set up camp, tear into a can of beans, and break wind. It’s what they like to imagine the great men of the Old West did. Then we’re shown the home they left behind. Jo’s mother, Sally (Jillian Bell), wakes up to find an empty child’s bed and an open window. “He kidnapped my child,” she says to the investigating officer, Detective Erickson (Ann Dowd).

Anna Kerrigan’s compassionate, sweetly realised drama finds small ways to challenge the assumptions that lie within these opening images. Gendered roles and expectations have become a burden to all involved. It’s gradually revealed that Joe is trans and has only recently come out to his parents – more precisely to his father, who doesn’t quite understand what he’s being told but still commits himself wholeheartedly to protecting his son’s happiness. The same can’t be said for Sally. And so Troy, in a moment of loving desperation, decides that he and Joe should flee for the Canadian border.

And who could better capture Troy’s guileless sincerity than Zahn? The actor’s known for playing the goof, in Reality Bites or You’ve Got Mail, but Cowboys reminds us that he also possesses the depth and tenderness of a leading man. There’s a battle behind each of Troy’s smiles. The strain in his face speaks to all that he’s sacrificed. Men in his hometown are expected to be steely and self-sufficient – no one seems to recognise that Troy is bipolar, up until the point his disorder can be used as a weapon against him. The police are quick to assume that he’s a violent threat.

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Kerrigan finds equal conflict within Sally, who’s represented not as the one-note, hollering villain of the piece, but as someone whose bigotry comes from her own deep-rooted flaws. Not only is Sally fixated on the idea of having a mini-me daughter, a perpetual ally by her side (her brother points out that she’s “always loved dolls”), but she has an uncomfortable concept of what womanhood represents. She’s the dour disciplinarian hunched over the sink cleaning dishes, while the men of the family are free to be wild and spontaneous. “Who would choose to be a girl?” she says, in a line Bell spits out with particular venom.

What’s clear from Cowboys is that Kerrigan, a cis artist approaching trans narratives, has taken every step possible to ensure her film possesses a kind of live-in truth. She cast a trans actor in the role of Joe, unlike far too many modern productions – Jared Leto and Eddie Redmayne were both nominated for Oscars for playing trans women, with Leto winning. And the writer-director also created an environment where Knight could draw from his own personal experiences without exploiting them for some superficial grab at verisimilitude – she encouraged him to keep a diary during filming, but it remained entirely private. At a time when both American lawmakers and the British media are openly threatening the safety and rights of transgender youth, Cowboys’ simple humanity offers a small but powerful relief.