The delightful modern-day high-school flick “She’s the He!”, Siobhan McCarthy’s thoroughly entertaining and cheeky directorial debut, dares to ask, “What if a comedy satirized the most toxically transphobic talking point conservatives often weaponize?” And in 82 compact minutes, the writer-director navigates this brilliant idea with ease, ridiculing the ridiculous right-wing moral panic called “the bathroom scare” by showing its actual silliness at face value. Yes, in this movie, you will see a group of young men pretending to be women in exaggeratedly feminine outfits, just to get into the girls’ locker room and bathroom. And yes, this scenario is both an exceedingly hilarious one in the context of the film and just as ludicrously improbable as it sounds in real life.
Thankfully, McCarthy doesn’t merely aim to deliver a political message with their outing, but instead wants to honor the transgender teenage experience that cinema geared towards young adults has sorely disregarded. And they do just that, by seamlessly blending age-old storytelling conventions with modern-day considerations. In that, the purposely lighthearted “She’s the He!” references and refurnishes everything, from the timeless Shakespearean cross-dressing comedies to the teen romps of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The resulting film is mostly a playful charmer, albeit one that sometimes errs on the side of too many stylistic asides. The lean authenticity of the central story, the committed cast, and the characters’ colorful worlds are substantial enough not to need the overcrowded needle drops, frequent split-screens, and busy animated visuals occasionally overlayed over the movie.
Still, beneath all these inessential bells and whistles is a bighearted story that follows Misha Osherovich’s Ethan and Nico Carney’s Alex, two high-school besties on the brink of graduation. (Osherovich is non-binary in real life, and Carney is a transgender man.) The very straight Alex—we only know this because he makes this point repeatedly—has a major crush on Sasha (Malia Pyles), but worries that because he is spending too much time with Ethan, everyone at school thinks that they are gay and a couple. He’s not entirely wrong in his assumptions, when even their quirky teacher seems to think and openly say so. So in order to change the narrative, he comes up with a, umm, brilliant plan. He and Ethan would pretend to be transgender, so that Alex could get a little closer to Sasha.
It isn’t entirely clear how it all of a sudden happens, what Alex hopes to get out of the experience, or how he plans to walk back on his lie. But the story moves fast enough for us not to question the exact details of the setup, and encourages us to abandon our disbelief when the two score a coveted invite to Sasha’s party. But something unexpected happens in the midst of it all: the until-then reluctant and shy Ethan realizes that she is actually transgender, discovering and easing into her identity for the first time. What nearly derails her coming out is the very lie that helped shape the truth, as well as her single mom, Mary (Suzanne Cryer), who seems to need both more time and a much better attitude to process her daughter’s journey.
A truly exceptional performer, Osherovich plays Ethan with such generous empathy and relatable sweetness that you wish their character were even better established, with an extra scene or two before we meet Alex at the start. Still, their portrayal of Ethan is bound to disarm even the most cynical of viewers. Elsewhere, McCarthy deserves a lot of credit for not painting Mary as a one-note villain. Even when she isn’t exactly supportive of her and says hurtfully discouraging things, there is an honesty to the way McCarthy has written her as a mother who wants to do better, but is perhaps scared and lacks the right tools in a judgmental world. It’s thanks to that realness that when Mary uses the “she” pronoun for the first time in an understated exchange, our hearts swell with love. Also wonderfully depicted is Ethan’s newfound infatuation with the no-nonsense, non-binary Forest (Tatiana Ringsby), reminding us that allies can be defining lifelines.
Amid all that, McCarthy’s most notable achievement is making “She’s the He!” feel like an old-fashioned high-school flick about friendship, but one that has new ideas. It’s the rarest of skills, making something new out of something old.
