Stonewall (2015 film)

Stonewall is a 2015 American coming-of-age drama film directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Jon Robin Baitz, and starring Jeremy Irvine, Jonny Beauchamp, Joey King, Caleb Landry Jones, Matt Craven, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Ron Perlman.

Shortly before fleeing the conservative countryside in the late 1960s and moving to New York City, Danny Winters, a gay boy from Indiana, is discovered by friends while making love with his boyfriend.

Danny goes with his friends to the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, and is asked for a dance by a man, Trevor, who is a member of the Mattachine Society, a homophile rights group.

Through his involvement with the Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles, Emmerich did a fundraiser for their homeless youth program, he found the idea for the protagonist in seeing countryside migrants who move to the big city only to find themselves in unfavorable conditions of homelessness, drug abuse and prostitution, and asked screenwriter Jon Robin Baitz, who Emmerich hired after seeing his play Other Desert Cities, to do a script centered around such a character, a man who after being uncloseted and shunned "has to find a family at the most unlikely place in these other kids.”[5] On April 9, 2014, Irvine joined the cast of the film.

"To anyone with concerns about the diversity of the #StonewallMovie, I saw the movie for the 1st time last week and can assure you all that it represents almost every race and division of society that was so fundamental to one of the most noteworthy civil rights movements in living history," Irvine wrote on his Instagram account.

The site's consensus states: "As an ordinary coming-of-age drama, Stonewall is merely dull and scattered—but as an attempt to depict a pivotal moment in American history, it's offensively bad.

Lawson faults the director for taking "one of the most politically charged periods of the last century" and making it into "a bland, facile coming-of-age story", and says that the role of Marsha P. Johnson was "played as comic relief, flatly".

According to Lawson, the treatment of Johnson is part of a wider lack of respect for non-white and "non-butch" characters in the movie; he believes they are treated with "only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention", showing the riots through a "white, bizarrely heteronormative lens".

[24] In The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that the film "does a reasonably good job of evoking the heady mixture of wildness and dread that permeated Greenwich Village street life" but that "its invention of a generic white knight who prompted the riots by hurling the first brick into a window is tantamount to stealing history from the people who made it".

[25] Writing for Gawker in a piece entitled "There Aren't Enough Bricks in the World to Throw at Roland Emmerich's Appalling Stonewall", Rich Juzwiak wrote that the film is "formally inconsistent" and "teaches you about as much about being gay as the Aristocats taught you about being an aristocrat.

"[26] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote that, while Emmerich "has made a movie even less historically accurate than 10,000 BC", the most fatal problem of the film is that it "embrace[s] every wrong cliche", which "in the desperate lack of nuance afflict[s] nearly every performance.

"[30] Another Stonewall veteran Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt also denounced the inaccuracy in terms of the characters' choices, its production design, etc., while acknowledging "the street kids being the main engine of things" and the extent to which the police were violent against homosexuals to be accurate.