As he says in his opening voice-over, cute teenager Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) leads a “perfectly normal life” and is “just like you”. “You” and “normal” meaning vanilla and assumed to be straight. But he has “one huge ass secret” in that he is neither. Recurring fantasies about Daniel Radcliffe put paid to that. Something to do with the Philosopher’s Stone entering the Goblet of Fire, I presume.

But when his quarterback father Jack (Josh Duhamel) and beauty queen mother Emily (Jennifer Garner) assume that he’s straight. And when his close friends and teachers assume that he’s straight. And when the world and his heterosexual wife and their 2.4 children assume that he’s straight, you can forgive him for taking a Captain Oates approach to coming out in that he “may be some time”.

Exercising what should be the right of every LGBTQI  (and any other letter of the alphabet we can get our hands on) identifying person, the decision as to when, where, to whom, how and why to come out is his and his alone. And through a clandestine email exchange with another closeted pupil who goes by the handle Blue, he grows more and more comfortable with his sexuality to the point that he is ready to make a big splash by leaping off the springboard of assumed heterosexuality and performing a Tom Daley-inspired somersault into the warm but uncharted waters of gaydom.

That is until an angry classmate steels his thunder and outs him to the entire school. For understandable reasons, none of which are associated with his sexuality, his friends desert him. His so-called liberal parents struggle to grapple with having what gay rights activist Terry Sanderson called in his seminal book of the same name a Stranger In The Family. And his online friend, for whom he has developed a crush, panics at being outed and disappears into the cyber closet.

But this is no slit your wrists story about repression suffocating desire for Simon is young and attractive and “done being scared”, “done living in a world where I don’t get to be who I am”.  And as he warns us in a voice-over before going out on the pull, things are about to get “romantic as fuck” for like every other human being on the planet, whether LGBTQI or not, he deserves “a great love story”. Or at the very least, an unashamed snog with a cute guy in the front seat of his car as he drives his BFFs to school.

Based on Becky Albertalli’s debut novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, director Greg Berlanti and screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker have created a refreshing coming-of-age coming-out drama which succeeds in being funny and upbeat, moving and honest. But more than that, it’s what Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills tweeted: “An important film”. In that it presents a gay protagonist not as a victim of circumstance but as the master of their own destiny. And, above all, it offers hope to those who are struggling with their sexuality and/or on the cusp of coming out.

Sure, there are a few melodramatic moments ‒ particularly the parental monologues which are gushy in comparison to Michael Stuhlbarg’s incredibly powerful one-to-one with Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name; like most American movies, everyone is sheltered from the slings and arrows of the financial crash and lives in a house on a hill or a swish apartment more Friends than Roseanne; and despite the bold premise, there’s a distinctly don’t frighten the horses feel to the theme of gay people are “just like you”.

But if I was to wind back the clock to 1BC (before coming out), I know for sure that Love, Simon would have had a profound affect on me and hastened my desire to come out of the closet ‒ just as it has countless teenagers throughout the US and beyond, as a quick glance at Twitter attests. So, yes, an important film. And sweet and funny to boot! But as for entertaining fantasies about Daniel Radcliffe? To quote Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

Director: Greg Berlanti
Writers: Elizabeth Berger (screenplay by), Isaac Aptaker (screenplay by) 
Stars: Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel
Peter Callaghan
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