Honeyglue

Writer-director James Bird took inspiration from real-life experiences, and the story is obviously heartfelt. But despite a stylized, edgy surface, Honeyglue doesn’t stray from the well-worn weepy narrative.

Jessica Tuck gives an emotionally raw performance as Morgan’s mother, and Amanda Plummer’s turn as a trailer park resident sheds more light on Jordan than all the other scenes combined.

Honeyglue has a very good movie inside it, but decisions brought on by inexperience prevent it from sprouting its wings.

Writer-director James Bird’s second feature tells an entirely familiar story with a dash of transvestism thrown in, but doesn’t do anything interesting with that twist – and the lumpen screenplay is drag enough.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

Throughout, Bird’s visuals are consistently flat, and his habit of cinematographically spinning around his characters (at a dinner table, on a dance floor, in a field) is dizzying in an unpleasant, nausea-inducing way — thus creating a fitting marriage of form and content.

[An] unintentionally hilarious tragic romance.