The Coney Island mood piece Beach Rats tells the double life of a closeted teen

Call it Bro Travail. Beach Rats, Eliza Hittman’s eroticized study of young male bodies and repressed sexuality along the arcades of Coney Island, owes a sizable debt to the films of Claire Denis (particularly a certain desert-set Herman Melville adaption), going so far as to copy the extraordinary French director’s cryptic fragmentation of close-ups and eye lines. On a conceptual level, it’s immaculate: the druggy summertime exploits of a closeted, often shirtless 19-year-old (Harris Dickinson, a really impressive unknown) and his gaggle of no-good macho buddies rendered as a grainy mixture of skin, smoke, and gazes. But Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom. It’s a shame, as Beach Rats has one of the year’s best parting shots. In a more fleshed-out film, it might have been transcendent.