The film is a dramatization of the real-life story of Brandon Teena (played by Hilary Swank), an American trans man who attempts to find himself and love in Nebraska but falls victim to a brutal hate crime perpetrated by two male acquaintances.

The producers initially wanted to film in Falls City, Nebraska, where the real-life events had taken place; however, budget constraints meant that principal photography had to occur in Texas.

Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, the film received a limited release in the United States on October 22, 1999, and it performed well at the North American box office, gaining three times its production budget by May 2000.

Brandon moves to Falls City, Nebraska, where he befriends ex-convicts John Lotter and Tom Nissen, and their friends Candace and Lana Tisdel.

[nb 1][11][12] Kimberly Peirce, at the time a Columbia University film student, became interested in the case after reading a 1994 Village Voice article by Donna Minkowitz.

Initially, the film was to be largely based on Aphrodite Jones' 1996 true crime book All She Wanted, which told the story of Brandon's final few weeks.

[20] Earlier drafts of the script incorporated scenes featuring Brandon's family background, including his sister Tammy and mother Joann, as well as some of Teena's ex-girlfriends.

[20] To fund the writing and development of the project, Peirce worked as a paralegal on a midnight shift and as a 35mm film projectionist; she also received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

[33] In addition, Peirce felt that Swank's audition was "the first time I saw someone who not only blurred the gender lines, but who was this beautiful, androgynous person with this cowboy hat and a sock in her pants, who smiled and loved being Brandon.

[31] Swank prepared for the role by dressing and living as a man for at least a month, including wrapping her chest in tension bandages and putting socks down the front of her trousers as Brandon Teena had done.

The scene in which Brandon, at the wishes of his friends, bumper-skis on the back of a pickup truck, was delayed when a police officer, just arriving at a shift change, required a large lighting crane to be moved from one side of the road to the other.

As a way to further incorporate the sense of artificial night, John Pirozzi, who had been experimenting with time-lapse photography using a non-motion-controlled moving camera, was invited to create the transition shots seen throughout the film.

[53] Because the film is set in the rural Midwestern United States, the Boys Don't Cry soundtrack album features a compilation of country, blues and rock music.

Nathan Larson and Nina Persson of The Cardigans composed an instrumental version of Restless Heart's 1988 country-pop song "The Bluest Eyes in Texas", a variation of which was used as the film's love theme and score.

It's about these guys whose world is so tenuous and so fragile that they can't stand to have any of their beliefs shattered", referring to John and Tom's views of their lives, Brandon's aspirations and his biological sex.

[67] Jack Halberstam attributed Boys Don't Cry's success to its ostensible argument for tolerance of sexual diversity by depicting a relationship between two unlikely people.

This tragic aspect of the love story led Halberstam to compare Brandon and Lana's relationship and subsequent drama to classic and modern romances including Romeo and Juliet, often using the term star-crossed lovers.

"Gender boundaries are taken extremely seriously in Western society, and Boys Don't Cry depicts how intensely threatened John and Tom are by Brandon's superior portrayal of a masculinity 'schedule'.

Throughout the film Brandon is presented as a doomed, though beguiling and beautiful rascal, recognizably located in the lineage of well-known cinematic bad-boys like James Dean, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman.

"On the surface, Boys Don't Cry appears to hold the potential of rendering gender in excess: the figure of Brandon Teena can be read variously as butch, male, lesbian, transgender, transsexual, and heterosexual.

[80] Rachel Swan, writing for Film Quarterly, wrote that Brandon's masculinity was often contrasted with Lana's femininity as a means of illustrating the two sides of the gender binary.

[81] In another piece, Halberstam compared the media portrayal of Brandon to that of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who no one knew was transgender until the post-mortem discovery that he was assigned female at birth.

She wrote, "On some level Brandon's story, while cleaving to its own specificity, needs to remain an open narrative—not a stable narrative of FTM transsexual identity nor a singular tale of queer bashing, not a cautionary fable about the violence of rural America nor an advertisement for urban organizations of queer community; like the narrative of Billy Tipton, Brandon's story permits a dream of transformation.

Within this universe of feeling and reaction structured by lack and tinted blue by country lyrics and a protective and threatening night-time light, characters imbricate gender and class through their longings for love, acceptance and a better life.

Maslin called Boys Don't Cry a tale of a trapped, small town character's search for life beyond the rural existence and the high price he pays for his view of the American Dream.

[59] Speaking about the film's cinematography and the relation to its themes: The Plains frontier landscape as it is constructed in Boys Don't Cry is dark, literally and figuratively.

[101] Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle lauded the lead acting performances of Swank, Sevigny, Saarsgard, and Sexton III, writing, "It may be the best-acted film of the year".

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times listed Boys Don't Cry as one of the five best films of 1999, saying, "This could have been a clinical movie of the week, but instead it's a sad song about a free spirit who tried to fly a little too close to the flame".

[111] Cooper wrote that Boys Don't Cry "is perhaps the only film addressing the issue of female masculinity by a self-described queer filmmaker to reach mainstream audiences and to receive critical acclaim and prestigious awards.

Howey said, "Even a cursory glance at reviews of Boys Don't Cry reveals that while most critics admired the film, few absorbed its main point: that Brandon Teena was a biological girl who felt innately that she was a man.