‘Mama’s Boy’ Overview: Mom and Son Pave the Means Ahead

Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech for greatest unique screenplay on the 2009 Academy Awards is featured twice in “Mama’s Boy,” the brand new HBO documentary about Black and his mom, Anne. It’s no surprise that the author, who received his Oscar for “Milk” (2008), the biopic of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist Harvey Milk, ended up in Hollywood on that podium: He’s a commanding and affecting speaker. Even when Black’s voice wavers onstage or throughout interviews for this movie, his perception in storytelling as a software for empathy and activism pours from every phrase. That stalwart perception has its benefits and drawbacks.

Adapted from Black’s memoir, the movie has him tracing the lifetime of his mom chronologically, from her childhood in small-town Louisiana and her unwillingness to give up to polio to her gradual acceptance of her son’s homosexual identification. Black’s childhood recollections, and the way his life was irrevocably formed by each his mom’s conservatism and her resilience, look like the spine of Laurent Bouzereau’s movie. Anecdotes about their intimate bond, akin to Christmas traditions, give texture to the movie’s thesis.

Yet “Mama’s Boy” lands as considerably naïve within the up to date local weather of L.G.B.T.Q. rights. That the screenwriter’s mom was modified by her empathy for folks totally different than her is an admirable worth to have. But the movie takes a considerably myopic strategy to Black’s reach-across-the-aisle activism philosophy, focusing totally on his work towards marriage equality. It doesn’t think about how political polarization could make the technique of sharing house with others, as his mom did, troublesome to execute when many locations exit of their method to bar these totally different from them from even getting into within the first place.

Mama’s Boy
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.