The ensemble cast, all of whom also played the roles in the play's initial stage run in New York City, includes Kenneth Nelson, Peter White, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Frederick Combs, Laurence Luckinbill, Keith Prentice, Robert La Tourneaux, and Reuben Greene.

In an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan in 1968, Michael, a Roman Catholic, recovering alcoholic and sporadically employed actor, hosts a birthday party for his friend, Harold.

Hank, a soon-to-be-divorced schoolteacher, and Larry, a fashion photographer, are a couple whose relationship is on the rocks, struggling with monogamy.

However, Alan arrives unexpectedly, finds Michael and his friends doing a line dance to Heat Wave, and throws the gathering into turmoil.

Michael informs everyone that they are playing a party game with the objective for each guest to call the one person he truly believes he has loved.

Crowley was paid $250,000 plus a percentage of the profits for the film rights; in addition to this, he received a fee for writing the script.

[2] Crowley and Dunne originally wanted the play's director, Robert Moore, to direct the film but Gordon Stulberg, head of Cinema Center, was reluctant to entrust the job to someone who had never made a movie before.

They decided on William Friedkin, who had just made a film of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter that impressed them.

Songs featured in the film include "Anything Goes" performed by Harpers Bizarre during the opening credits, "Good Lovin' Ain't Easy to Come By" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, "Funky Broadway" by Wilson Pickett, "(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and an instrumental version of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love".

[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

He's excellent without disturbing the ensemble...Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.

There is something basically unpleasant, however, about a play that seems to have been created in an inspiration of love-hate and that finally does nothing more than exploit its (I assume) sincerely conceived stereotypes.

"[9] In a San Francisco Chronicle review of a 1999 revival of the film, Edward Guthmann recalled "By the time Boys was released in 1970...it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism."

In one sense it's aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time.

There were those who agreed with most critics and believed The Boys in the Band was making great strides while others thought it portrayed a group of gay men wallowing in self-pity.

The Producers Guild of America Laurel Awards honored Cliff Gorman and Leonard Frey as Stars of Tomorrow.

Additional material includes an audio commentary; interviews with director Friedkin, playwright/screenwriter Crowley, executive producer Dominick Dunne, writer Tony Kushner, and two of the surviving cast members, Peter White and Laurence Luckinbill; and a retrospective look at both the off Broadway 1968 play and 1970 film.

Joe Mantello, director of the play's 2018 Broadway revival, served as director of the new film version, which featured the entire Broadway revival cast, including Jim Parsons as Michael, Zachary Quinto as Harold, Matt Bomer as Donald, and Charlie Carver as Cowboy.