Chasing Amy.

We all know the movie

tradition about

hetero-homo love.

When a gay character

falls for someone of the

opposite sexual orientation, the gay lover gets the

short end of the stick. That's what's so fresh about

Chasing Amy, the third film (following Clerks and

Mallrats) in the New Jersey trilogy by director

Kevin Smith. Here a straight man falls in love with

a lesbian, and wherever he winds up, it's not on

top. Although its execution is flawed, Smith's story

is unique. With some wonderful jabs at gender and

racial stereotypes, Chasing Amy eschews political

correctness to explore sexual identify with

more thoughtfulness than we've

seen before, at least from a

filmmaker who happens to be a

26-year-old straight guy.

Chasing Amy tells the

story of het

buddiescum-roommates

Holden (Ben Affleck) and

Banky (Jason Lee), coauthors of the

successful cult comic book series

Bluntman and Chronic. Holden falls in

love with a fellow comic-book author,

Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams),

who, according to the film's coy production notes,

"has set her romantic sights elsewhere." In other

words, she's a big dyke. As the curious triangle

between Holden, Banky, and Alyssa twists and

sums, the film weaves between comic and heartfelt

moments.

Although Smith's dialogue tends to be cardboard

and mechanical, Chasing Amy evidences a

maturation in his writing. There are terrific

exchanges between the provincial but

determined-to-be-hip Holden and the subtly

self-loathing Banky, who is

privately battling demons of his

own. Best of all is the friendship

of Holden and the flamboyantly

gay Hooper (Dwight Ewell.

from Stone wall and Flirt),

an African-American

comic-book author

masquerading for his public as a

latter-day Black Panther. Although

Holden and Hooper are opposites in

many ways, Smith gives them a bond

that's both joyous and moving.

Smith underscores his themes with

just the right tinge of desperation, the

kind everyone (gay or straight, male or

female) feels over finding true love and,

sometimes, losing it. Affleck and Lee turn

in well-rounded, gently nuanced

performances that are terrific to watch,

and Ewell's work is fabulously dead-on.

But the fact that some things are so

good only makes the bad all the more

obvious and painful. The introduction of

Alyssa's lesbianism is a hackneyed,

amateurish moment, played for laughs at

the woman's expense. Smith may want to

be fair about all this lesbian stuff, but

that doesn't mean he understands it well

enough to present it convincingly.

Adams, to whom the hardest task

admittedly falls, turns in a performance

so consistently and voluminously shrill,

it's as though she went over the top and

right on down the cliff. The character of

Alyssa begs for restraint; there's too little

of it here. And the film's epilogue ending

is a truly disappointing film-school

device: Holden, Banky, and Alyssa each

get "I'm moving on" moments that,

instead of conveying the intended

triumph, land with a thud.

On the whole the idea of this film is

more successful than the film itself. While

at some level Chasing Amy is really about

a man successfully pursuing a woman,

there's something thoroughly enjoyable

about seeing male virility challenged so

roundly, especially by some very

heterosexual characters. And it's terrific

to see straight characters grappling in a

realistic way with what it means to be a

gay person in contemporary America.

This is not a film filled with rampant

political correctness or sympathetic

liberal archetypes. Chasing Amy leads

gay viewers to examine ourselves: If we

don't mind when straight people fall for

gay people (and who can blame them?),

what makes us so hostile when someone

who's gay sleeps with someone of the

opposite sex? How ironic that a straight

director should make a movie that

reminds gays and lesbians of what we've

been saying all along: Rules are meant

to be broken.