A return to the real-life story of Teena Brandon, the young girl who dis¬guised herself as a boy and was raped and murdered six years ago (also the subject of a 1998 documentary, The Brandon Teena Story), Boys Don't Cry is a hard-hitting and controversial mixture of fiction and non-fiction in its portrayal of the tender love story between two outcasts. Hilary Swank plays the sexual misfit and Chloe Sevigny the sensitive girlfriend in a multi-layered script written by direc¬tor Kimberley Peirce and Andy Bienen, inspired in part by such uniquely American movies as Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. The result was a film that Variety described as "a Rebel Without a Cause for these culturally diverse and complex times".