Swan Song Review: An Exhilarating and Moving Tribute to a Queer Trailblazer

Todd Stephens’s Swan Song opens on a glorious image of Udo Kier, decked out in a purple fur coat, strutting on to the stage of a cavernous auditorium, and soaking in the applause of an unseen audience. He plays the real-life Pat Pitsenbarger, a bar performer and one-time hairdresser to the wealthy women of the small town of Sandusky, Ohio. Clearly understanding the distinctive screen presence of his leading man, Stephens lingers on this moment in seductive slow motion, instantly whetting our appetites for what Kier will bring to a starring role that perfectly complements his aura of outré weirdness.

As Swan Song cuts away from this dream sequence to Pat’s current reality in a drab nursing home, Kier puts his range to work. Pat is wasting away his remaining days hording and obsessively folding the facility’s cheap serviettes while sneaking drags of his beloved More cigarettes under the watchful eye of his attending nurse, Shaundell (Roshon Thomas). It’s an existence that couldn’t be farther removed from his glory days as the legendary Mr. Pat. He may still have that mischievous glint in his eye, but Kier knowingly captures the bitter loneliness and desperation felt when one is effectively shuttled away to die.

But then a lawyer, Mr. Shanrock (Tom Bloom), comes knocking with an unexpected proposal: to style the hair of Pat’s recently deceased former client and friend, Rita Parker Sloan (played by Linda Evans in a series of hallucination sequences), for her upcoming wake. And despite having long ago acrimoniously parted ways with Rita, a local socialite known as “the most glamorous woman in town,” Pat decides to take up the challenge, as it gives him a reason to break out of his current residence and trek back to his old stomping grounds in style.

At this point, Pat turns the dial up on his ostentatiousness, even while dressed in a shabby gray jump suit and fanny pack. As he hunts for a discontinued hair product that he needs for his hairstyling duties, the film shuttles him through a series of charming encounters with eccentric locals. His quest eventually takes him to the salon of his former protégé, Dee Dee Dale (Jennifer Coolidge), whose betrayal of him decades ago still smarts. In the film’s funniest scene, the pair trade cutting barbs, giving Kier and Coolidge the opportunity to gleefully egg each other on to increasing levels of venomous wit. As Pat gloats about Rita’s good taste in choosing him to style her in death over Dee Dee, Coolidge exquisitely flashes that trademark squint and pout of hers as her character retorts, “Taste or dementia? You decide.”

For as consistently hilarious as Swan Song is, the film’s tender side resonates just as memorably, especially when it comes to examining the long shadow of the AIDS crisis. We learn that Pat’s lover, David (Eric Eisenbrey), died of the disease at the pandemic’s height, spurring on his straight clients and friends at the time to effectively shun him, and Kier makes that trauma felt in surprising ways. When revisiting his former house only to discover that it’s been demolished, Pat tells the well-meaning couple, Lyle (Bryant Carroll) and Evie (Shelby Garrett), now living on the property how he lost everything after David’s nephew legally usurped his claims to his former home. “Well, at least something like that could never happen today,” Evie optimistically offers as consolation, and Pat’s facial expression and simple response of “great” become in Kier’s hands a master class in subtly conflicting emotions.

The disconnect between the realities of different generations of gay men is one of Swan Song’s most unexpectedly joyful through lines. Re-emerging into a landscape where gay culture has been more or less absorbed into the mainstream, Pat tells an old friend, Eunice (Ira Hawkins), at one point, “I wouldn’t even know how to be gay anymore.” But throughout the course of Pat’s daylong odyssey, Stephens shrewdly details how the man’s legacy has paved the way for today’s queer kids to unabashedly embrace their queerness. It’s a sentiment that culminates in a celebratory final drag show, marking the closing of a historical Sandusky gay bar, that exhilaratingly bridges the gap between two vastly different eras in queer culture.