Desire Lines 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the issues it wants to address but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional interview documentary, part experimental dramatization, it is a record of the gay and transmasculine experience. As individual interview subjects and in role-playing pairs, the subjects discuss the specificities of this experience, from transphobia among cis gay men and difficulties in hooking up to a lack of HIV awareness in trans men and the gender euphoria found in intimacy and fetishism. Several also discuss the intersection of racial identity with homosexuality and the normative whiteness of gay male spaces.

These interviews offer a good introduction to the film’s thematic throughline, though nothing here is likely to strike anyone who has spent time in trans spaces, even just online. But the film is not trying to be an essay. It argues for the importance of archiving trans history and experiences, and calls out the invisibility of gay trans men in the historical record. 

Director: Jules Rosskam
Writers: Jules Rosskam, Nate Gualtieri
Stars: Aden Hakimi, André Alan Pérez, Theo Germaine

Many gender clinicians and clinicians (not to mention writers) didn’t even consider this as a possible identity in the 80s and 90s, regardless of the many people who were actively living it at the time. In that sense, any film that documents these lives is a welcome corrective. In particular, the variety of materials here provides useful context for changes in terminology over time, and several of the most interesting moments emerge from how people relate to the language available, given a self-conception that is obviously more complex than language can capture.

Where Desire Lines struggles is in its effort to develop the idea of ​​the archive into a formal device that structures the film itself. The second main thread is a dramatized visit by an Iranian-American trans man to a queer archive, where he meets and connects with a young archivist who works there. There is chemistry between the two that makes some of these scenes work, but almost nothing else does this thread. It’s not clear what this man is trying to investigate in the first place, or what unites his findings beyond their relevance to the film’s broader themes. In several “time travel” sequences, his journey through the archive becomes a literal trip into the past, and the physical space of the archive becomes a bathhouse, a relatively safe space to navigate.

These scenes are partly a means of incorporating archival documentary elements, partly an excuse to introduce narrative sequences that approach the film’s themes from another angle. Both strategies seem convoluted in relation to conventional documentary or narrative filmmaking, and spend too much time working on fewer ideas. A more radical work, more committed to its formal experimentation, might have found a productive use for the idea of ​​a time travel archive, and a way to integrate the various archival and interview elements into a clear structure.

As it stands, the film bounces back and forth between its strategies without ever quite figuring out how to integrate them into a productive conversation. One thread that he attempts to use for this purpose is the case of Lou Sullivan, one of the first publicly gay transgender men, who recorded a series of interviews between 1988 and 1990 after he was diagnosed with AIDS (he died in 1991). The archivist and the visitor watch some of these interviews together, and letters between Lou and his transmasculine correspondents are interspersed throughout the interview segments. The intention, clearly, is to connect the experiences of transgender people across generations and to highlight how the ways we talk about their experiences have perhaps changed more than the actual experiences. This point, at least, is fairly well made, even if the film stumbles in its formal decisions.

Watch Desire Lines 2025 Movie Trailer