Critic Reviews

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

More than a half-century after first taking the stage, “The Boys in the Band” still leaves us with so much to think about, so much to feel, so much to consider.

To run the fool’s errand of divorcing the film from a political context and examine it merely qualitatively, Joe Mantello’s starry-eyed stab at the material is thrilling, an exciting cobbling together of consummate performers delivering acid dipped quips and making the Greenwich Village apartment the film is set in a both dramatically and cinematically elastic playground.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

Strongly acted and effectively staged, The Boys In The Band has lost little of its impact in the five decades since its first debut, and is a fitting tribute to its creator Mart Crowley, who died in March.

With a dynamite cast led by a never-better Jim Parsons, what could have been a dated retelling of a 1968 play about gay men in crisis emerges instead as a funny, fierce and scarily relevant wakeup call to a resurgent threat to marginalized minorities.

Mantello is the first to tell people he hasn’t had a lot of experience directing movies (his last feature was the 1997 adaptation of his Broadway hit Love! Valour! Compassion!), yet his version of Boys fights its stage roots far more than Friedkin’s film.

Despite all these challenges, the performances that Mantello wrings make the 2020 effort worth everyone’s trouble.

Like all great works of art, the story’s point has resonances beyond its era and even beyond the specific subject of gay people, generally.

Parsons has some sharp, truthful moments, but his demeanor lacks the world-weary authority as written. (His zingers have lost a lot of their zing, it must be said.) Everyone else is wonderful, and the limitations of Parsons and Quinto, in the end, are just that — limitations of often effective work.