'Backspot' Is Full Of Lesbian Anxiety and Not Much Else
I’ve never been edged by way of character development until now
This review is part of the SXSW 2024 coverage on Hi Shelli!
I wanted to be a cheerleader so bad when I was a little girl. I did it for a very short time, it was one of the things that I picked up and put down when I was searching for myself and friendship.
It didn’t stick.
First of all, it was expensive, and the friendship element didn’t really make its way to me. I went the softball route (shut your mouth) and I still remember how to do a herkie so cheer wasn’t a complete waste of time.
I also left the sport with my love of cheerleaders intact. So, of course, movies like Bring It On, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Sugar & Spice were very important to me. They didn’t have some huge impact on me like other movies did, they were just fun films that had this world of cheerleading that I liked for very non-gay reasons.
But I’m A Cheerleader was different, I liked it because it was gay. I’d consider it my intro to queerleader films. 24 years after its release Bottoms made a dykey splash and now we have another one to add, Backspot. Executive-produced by Elliot Page and the first feature from director D.W. Waterson. Girlfriend drama, nosebleeds, jealousy, and a blonde Evan Rachel Wood who chews gum in the most lesbian way possible all are part of its 92-minute runtime.
Riley (Devery Jacobs, Reservation Dogs) is a cheerleader. She takes her sport seriously and is the backspot position on her squad but has much bigger goals, including making it onto the Thunderhawks, an All-Star team coached by Eileen McNamera (Evan Rachel Wood, True Blood if you’re a dyke, Thirteen if you’re a dyke and a millennial.) She eventually makes it onto the team—along with her girlfriend Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo)—and it just heightens Riley’s need to be perfect and her already intense anxiety.
In her spare time, she sits in her room and watches videos of herself at practices. She strives for perfection and the world of competitive cheer is the only place she can find it. She picks herself apart on and off the screen. Although not verbalized in the film, she shows signs of trichotillomania—the uncontrollable urge to pull out hair from parts of the body—in Riley’s case her eyebrows—especially when you’re stressed.
There’s a scene where we zoom in on her short fingernails moving back and forth over her eyebrow as she chooses the perfect hair. The bass in the music builds until she plucks that perfect hair and then—release. It’s a perfect use of camera work and scoring to give us just a peek into how crippling her anxiety is.
Here’s the thing, this movie was…tedious.
I wanted to like Backspot, I really did. Putting my love of cheerleaders aside, I was looking forward to this being a film that was going to set itself apart by being a queerleader film that told a darker story than the others.
But as it ticked on, it kept annoyingly introducing characters and setting up moments only to never expand on either. It wanted me to do a whole lot of reading between the lines. In film that can be fair, I love when directors and writers trust that their viewers are smart, but Backspot wanted me to fill in too many gaps.
It felt like it wanted me to be invested in Riley’s relationships because feminism! and ‘cos women loving/supporting/guiding other women is the right thing to do. That may be, but I’m not finna blindly enjoy/support their relationships—outside of the film world that’s actually how a lot of y’all get in trouble but…anyway. If I don’t have enough information about her relationships and the people she has them with, then I can’t truly care about their connection, and any progression it has doesn’t hit with me.
Take Riley’s relationship with Amanda. They are high school sweethearts who share a love of a sport and it’s part of the glue that holds them together. Great. Cool. What else?
And her relationship with Eileen. They are characters who connect because they see their past and future in one another. That’s all good, but what is Riley seeking in her? And what is it about Riley that makes Eileen keep her at a distance?
And what’s the deal with Riley and her mum (Shannyn Sossamon, A Knight’s Tale if you’re a bottom, 40 Days and 40 Nights if you’re a switch)? It’s clear that’s where she gets her anxiety from but what else is to their relationship?
Backspot would have worked better as a series. A space where this sort of storytelling set-up works, especially in a premiere episode. You present all your characters and their issues then spend the next 7 episodes peeling back at them. A Bunheads-style show where we get into the heads and lives of these characters and give their stories space to breathe and their arcs time to grow.
Instead, we get lots of rushed peeks into many characters—Eileen has issues with her ex-wife (did her coaching life ruin their relationship?) Amanda’s home life feels erratic (is she another provider for her family?) Laila brings up fatphobia in competitive cheer (is this the first time she has gotten rejected in the sport?)—and many others. These peeks are great but could have been turned into fuller stories to advance the plot, its characters, and the vibe of the film as a whole.
In the end, it’s a movie that was depending on its queer factor and familiar faces in front of and behind the camera to make it a success. It’s so unfair because it feels like we as a queer audience are still so starved for representation—some of us more than others—so we are expected to just be happy about the amount of queerness surrounding a film and accept what’s given to us. No matter how lazily done it all feels or how lackluster/bad the story.
Backspot could have been a really fly dramatic addition to the queerleader film canon but instead, it’s just gonna be one that can be mentioned in the conversation, but not nearly dope enough to be a major part of it.
It wastes really good performances from Jacobs and Rutendo, and tries far too hard in its dialogue to remind its queer viewer just how dykey it is. While proud of the queer percentage it gets to boast, there isn’t much else I can root for.
Extras:
Jacobs is queer IRL and has talked about the importance of authentic representation in film.
Listen, we all know how I feel about AS…but Kayla did an awesome job on this history of queerleaders and I simply can’t not share it. She was working on it while I was still Culture Editor and it gives some very dope queer film history.
Another interracial lesbian romance. I am again BEGGING for queer filmmakers to let Black queer folks kiss/date/fuck/touch other Black queer folks on screen.
“Don’t call me ‘Sir’, I’m 32, that hurts my feelings.” is the best line in the film and it’s spoken by Thomas Antony Olajide
BTW, the only (official) trailer for the film is from TIFF 23 where the film premiered <3
Slight Spoilers:
There is a form of representation in this film that I did dig—annoying white dykes who think this marginalized part of their identity makes them smarter and better than everyone else around them. I’m so glad we put them on display in this movie through the character Nikki (Madison Seguin). She dismisses Riley and the other cheerleaders—including her girlfriend Banigan (Adrianna Di Liello)—and their love for the sport. Saying it’s overly sexual, infantilizing, obviously for the male gaze, and most importantly, not even a real sport.
I can’t stand dykes like this. In my experience, it’s often white lesbians who think that they are more liberal and progressive than everyone around them who are causing the most harm. So here is hoping they see themselves and I don’t know, stop it.
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