The energy between the two of them is sweet one moment, explosively unstable the next, and compulsively watchable throughout. Allen is just as strong, his body rippling with a raw potential for violence.
He’s seldom been goofier or more tender than he is here. A low-rent porn producer who’s in love with his star talent (Keegan Allen as Harlow), Joe rescued the twentysomething from the memory of an abusive childhood and the military community that shamed him out of its ranks, and he strains himself to the breaking point (and beyond) to maintain a certain lifestyle for his big-dicked beau and business partner.įranco has played gay almost as often as he’s played straight, so ubiquitous that all of his performances have come to feel equidistant from his true self. Joe ( James Franco) is an aging bottom with big ambition. Meanwhile, down in the valley, The Viper Boyz are getting ready to strike. Clayton expertly negotiates the character’s waning innocence against his budding sense of agency - he isn’t Dirk Diggler, he’s someone who’s done his best to learn from Dirk Diggler’s mistakes. Initially, the psychosexual dynamics between the Svengali and his stud are more complicated than the contract that binds them together, but it isn’t long before the two sides of their arrangement blur into one - that’s when things start to get messy.īrent may be naïve, but it soon becomes clear that the cherubic kid is a lot more cunning than he seems. He isn’t trying to exploit these boys, he’s just trying to discover them in the hopes that they might discover him in return.
He wants to film young boys masturbating in his living room, but he’s going to do it with some Chopin playing over the sound system and a glass of red wine in his free hand. There’s something predatory about that pattern, but Stephen - who’s considerably older than the other characters in this story - is only trying to carve a space out where he’s safe to be himself. While too old (and too scared) to insert himself directly into the action, he is nevertheless the king of King Cobra videos.īrent is but Stephen’s newest and most promising discovery, the latest in a presumably long line of “lost” boys whom he’s all too eager to save and set up on their feet. An inconspicuous and firmly closeted guy who fits right into the fabric of suburbia, Stephen runs a lucrative porn empire out of his ticky-tack house. Stephen (Christian Slater) is waiting for him at the station.
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James Franco Breaks Silence on Sexual Misconduct Allegations, Seth Rogen Split Rebranding himself as “Brent Corrigan” and telling his oblivious mom (Alicia Silverstone) that he’s off to a paid internship on a film set (kind of!), he hops a bus that’s heading out of San Diego and towards the verdant suburbs up north. Sean Paul Lockhart (“The Fosters” alum Garrett Clayton) is a twink with a twinkle in his eyes, barely out of high school and already chomping at the bit to leave his life behind. Assuming a tragicomic tone that isn’t far removed from the likes of “Boogie Nights,” Kelly’s sordid story takes us back in time to the glory days of 2006, when YouTube was less than a year old and tube sites had yet to make smut a lot less profitable for the people who made it. Possibly the best film ever made about the business end of America’s gay porn industry (Google makes this an extremely difficult point to research), Justin Kelly’s “ King Cobra” is a sensitive and darkly hilarious true crime story that works from top to bottom.
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