End of the innocence.

The gay love story in Chuck and Buck has many an odd and surprising twist--and so has the movie's creator and star, Michael White 

Buck is no Rain Man, and the new film Chuck and Buck is no Sling Blade. Buck may be a 27-year-old man whose emotional life arrested at age 12--when his best friend, Chuck, moved away--but for screenwriter Michael White, just because a man is simple doesn't mean he can't be complex. For one thing, it quickly becomes clear in this dark comedy that Buck (who's also played by White) wants to have sex with Chuck.

"There's an idealization of that kind of character--the boy-man--in Hollywood movies because we have an idealization of childhood," says White, whose ideas about growing up have also played out on TV's Freaks and Geeks and Dawson's Creek, where he served as a writer and producer. "It's like [these men] are morally pure and above the moral ambiguities of adult life. I thought it would be interesting to have an audience see someone who has all of the endearing traits of a childish personality--that sort of eternal innocent--but who also has this intense sexual drive, because I believe that children themselves can be aggressive and sexual and complicated."

That's Buck in a nutshell. After his mother dies and his old friend Chuck (now called Charlie) resurfaces, Buck packs up his beloved toys and children's records and follows his long-lost pal to Los Angeles. For Charlie--now a music business executive--Buck is an embarrassing reminder of something he put behind him, something he can't quite bring himself to explain to his fiancee.

"Living in L.A., it's like you have to project the person you think the world wants you to be--then [there's] the person that you're afraid you really are, deep down," White says. "Chuck is the guy who's handsome and confident and putting his face out there, and Buck is his shadow, who's tapping at the window saying, `Remember me?'--and not going away."

Unlike most Hollywood films, where plot is paramount, or feel-good gay flicks ruled by their emotions, Chuck and Buck is a movie born of ideas, many of them challenging or even disturbing. So it's no surprise that talking to White--from whose self-described "little twisted head" the film emerged--is like rushing through a nonstop rainstorm of notions and revelations. Asked whether some viewers might think that the film suggests homosexuality is a childish phase that gay men need to outgrow, White bubbles with a series of thoughts. "I don't believe it--but it's interesting," he begins. Compared with most cookie-cutter films, he continues, "I think what this movie is doing is much more interesting--in a sense, subversive." He races on: "It's a call to bisexuality," he says, and "Chuck's problem" is really that "he's so uptight and so afraid of that side of himself." Finally trailing off, White adds, "As an artist, somebody who's trying to create something that's personal and interesting, that's what I wanted to do."

Somewhere in the middle of this verbal outburst White also happens to mention, "You know, my father's gay ..." Indeed, he reveals later, his dad is the Rev. Mel White, the long-closeted conservative Christian speechwriter for Jerry Falwell and others who is now an out, ardent activist for gay rights in Christian denominations [see story].

White the Younger declines to discuss his personal life any further, but suddenly what he terms his "kind of complicated view" of sexuality seems even more complicated--particularly a scene he sees as pivotal in the film, in which Buck sits staring at the crude collages of family photos he has made, one for his mom and one for his dad. "It comes back to that [in] childhood you love both your parents," White says. "It's like those are your first crushes, you know? I think that that's at least where I come down."

In any case, White says, Chuck and Buck isn't chiefly about Buck's quest for consummation. "To me, his whole journey is less about sex--it's [that] he has these needs and he thinks that Chuck is that person." But in the end Buck "realizes that sex doesn't necessarily mean he's going to have that love."

With an agenda that includes deconstructing Hollywood's "template" for innocence and challenging rigid notions of sexual identity, White certainly isn't worried about where Chuck and Buck falls on the scale of positive gay role models. "You know," he says, "if everybody loved it, I would think I might not have done my job."

But a number of critics have loved the movie, a reaction White finds "really gratifying. I mean, my alter ego is up there." At the same time, all the attention is a bit daunting, he says: "I'm not an actor, really, and I'm not an extroverted person, even, so while it's been gratifying, it's also been kind of traumatic."

Buck couldn't have said it better himself.