Review: Holding Trevor

Where to begin? First there’s the awful title: a screechy play on the lead character’s full name, Trevor Holden, that brings back bad memories of Nearing Grace while tainting fond ones of Catcher in the Rye. Then there’s actor and writer Brent Gorski, whose lips were apparently enough to guarantee the film a distributor. For the gay cine-marketplace’s viewing pleasure, that mouth is meant to distract from a turgidly directed and scripted story that has Gorski’s Trevor pouting his way through his relationship with some Martha Stewart queer (Eli Kranski) after his H-head ex-flame sexily overdoses. During a screaming jag, Andie (Melissa Searing) succinctly diagnoses her rapport with the cutie as “the Trevor show”—which is also a handy critique of a film that revolves entirely around the trite, self-cocooning ramblings of a do-nothing L.A. gay boy. That’s not to say Gorski’s script lacks for generosity. For Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary, he seemingly campaigns for the addition of “Screaming Inside Your Vehicle at the Car Wash” (or, as directed by Rosser Goodman: “Screaming Inside Your Vehicle at the Car Wash while Cum-Like Gushers of Soap Dribble from Phallic Pistons Outside”), and for Shortbus alum and real-life buddy Jay Brannan, Gorski offers a mincing supporting role as one of his two BFF’s. (Brannon the writer and singer of “Lower My Gun” hardly feels like the same person who unfunnily tells Andie, “You need more liquor, bitch,” and given the poetic introspection of the singer-songwriter’s lyrics, one wonders why he didn’t write the script himself.) But Gorski reserves the greatest gift of all for his audience in the form of party-ready advice: Never call a girl a cunt unless you know she wasn’t recently infected with HIV.