Lavender Men

It’s a film with potent ideas, inner conflict, historical imagination, dramatic challenge, queer power, human fragility, humor, sex, pathos. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes it great, and that’s what makes it great. There’s so much to its muchness that the veneer can hardly contain it, not unlike Taffeta themself.

Lavender Men is a heady and meta-theatrical excavation of Lincoln’s long-rumored gay affair that’s wildly ambitious if a tad overstuffed.

Tonal whiplash — farcical comedy, heavy drama, even a musical number — undermines the film’s emotional stakes. You want a better story for Taffeta, and for Lincoln and Ellsworth, too.