Adam 2019
04/06/2026
Adam (2019) dir. Rhys Ernst is a previously controversial and currently forgotten film about a cis teenager who pretends to be a tboy to date a lesbian. It’s based on a novel by Ariel Schrag, who is notable for having come up with the character Max when she was a staff writer on The L Word, and for being name dropped in Hot Topic by Le Tigre. Adam is 17, visiting his sister Casey (Margaret Qualley in dyke drag) in New York for the summer. He gets mistaken for trans-and-20something at a post-rally-for-marriage-equality party and keeps it up to date Gillian, while getting girl advice from his and Casey’s stealth roommate Ethan. It’s a 2006 period piece. The denouement is at Camp Trans. It's kind of hard to summarize it in a way that captures all of the interesting parts, but don't let that fool you: the movie is not good at all.
The problem with the movie (and the book, I assume) is that it likes Adam too much: it is not interested in his particular blundering nastiness, overly committed to tempering it with sincerity. He falls into being deceptive because he’s insecure, and nervous, and isn’t everyone exploring their identity at that age? Ernst and Schrag want us to see his genuine underbelly, the way he is learning and growing. Boring! Being 17 and out of sight of his parents and drinking a lot and desperate to lose his virginity and insecure about his ability to perform masculinity makes Adam incredibly cruel: the fact that it’s sincere and accidental should be the most interesting part of the film, but they can’t stop pulling their punches.
In a 2014 interview promoting the book, Ariel Schrag is asked about unflattering depictions of trans people and says:
“A couple of the female-to-male characters in ADAM behave, upon their entrance to manhood, like misogynistic teenage boys—which is something I’ve observed and wanted to comment on. Many of the trans characters in ADAM also have a notable slant toward the self-absorbed, which I think for most people in the early stages of transitioning is reality. How could it not be? Your presentation and often body are undergoing drastic changes on display to a not-especially-welcoming world. It would be insane not to be self-absorbed during this time.”This is pretty apt, actually! From a 2004 scene report on the New York/San Francisco lesbian/trannyboi scene depicted in Adam:
“Kelly, a boi in her late twenties, recently sent an e-mail to a fellow boi, an Internet acquaintance, regarding a femme they both know from the scene, that reads: ‘I hope she’s not a big deal, that you’re just riding her or whatever. Do you want me to keep an eye on her? Bros up bitches down.'"
In an oral history of the film from 2025, which lauds it as a forgotten classic (it isn’t), Ernst talks about how precisely the script recreates this milieu:
“It also described these spaces that I had literally been in after moving from Astoria to Bushwick around 2006. I went to The Hole, which is a bar depicted in the film, every Friday night. It was the coolest place I could ever imagine.”
This nostalgia operates in the same way as the affection for Adam: it defangs every part of the film that might be accidentally interesting. The scene in The Hole makes it seem extremely unpleasant— Adam is let in with an ID that is clearly not his, and is immediately hit on by a plastered 30-year-old with hipster glasses who tries to fuck him in the bathroom. The coolest place you could ever imagine!
One of the most frustrating problems is that there are almost compelling dynamics between the characters if you are willing to imagine them as real people who want real things from each other. His sister’s roommate, Ethan, is a trans guy who sees in Adam the opportunity to be stealth, to operate in a normal milieu of heterosexual masculinity in which he has the upper hand: Adam wants girl advice from him. This works until Adam does something so hopelessly transphobic that he's forced to out himself in anger. Adam’s lesbian sister Casey is both one of the more interestingly written and better performed parts of the film. Leaving her extremely homophobic household to go to New York produces a clawing desperation to be gay in the right way, politically and relationally. Like Ethan, Adam’s presence gives her a chance to have the upper hand: she’s not on the back foot, being lectured on her accidental assimilationism. She gets to correct someone on pronouns, for once.
In one of the most incisive beats of the entire film, Adam threatens to out her to their parents if she reveals to anyone that he’s been lying about his age. This is something the film gets right, actually: for everyone except Adam, there are real stakes! Adam is acting on impulse, and his impulse is to ruin his sister’s relationship with their parents over the possibility that she might prevent him from getting laid. I think that interpersonal stakes of Woke only really feel important when they’re underlaid by the real fears that Adam doesn’t have to worry about, when trivial political differences might actually be the thing that loses you the couch to surf on when you need it.
Adam’s lesbian girlfriend, Gillian, operates outside of the self-aggrandizing political performances given to every other minor character (one can only assume her nascent bisexuality has made her enlightened). This girl should be annoying as fuck! She has a women’s studies degree from Smith and she was a gay teen activist and she goes to Camp Trans and we’re supposed to accept that she’s not self-righteous at all? In order for us to like Adam, and like her with Adam, the film elides entirely any interesting questions of power dynamics in their relationship. What makes this 22-year-old interested in a teenager who is repeatedly obviously lying to her, which she is fully aware of? Like every other character, she’s kind of a freak for that, actually.
Adam observes transmasculine social dynamics and intuits correctly that being kind of pathetic (in one of the funniest scenes, he deflects a question about his transition by saying he’s “kind of fucked up about gender stuff”) and sexually coercive is an extremely effective way to access masculinity, and goes after it. The film cuts the most controversial scene in the book, where Adam gets tired of tucking in order to use a strap, and cuts the middleman.
All this to say that the narrative beats don’t need to change: the film just needed to be more willing to twist the knife. When I’ve told people about the film, the premise sounds so much funnier and more compelling than the actual experience of viewing it. Much of the controversy at the time turned on the fact that Adam doesn’t get punished, but it’s exactly right: the end is devastating because Ethan forgives Adam, because he gets to go back to his normal life having gotten what he wanted and learned some lessons along the way, because actual transsexual life and death only exists to him as a foil for his adolescent self-discovery. The fact that the film depicts this as sweet is nauseating— there’s a different, better, uglier version of this story that understands how dehumanizing it is, precisely because Adam’s cruelties are naïve.
The whole thing gets at a larger problem with transmasculine cinema, which hasn’t really found its footing yet, I think (By Hook or By Crook notwithstanding). Everyone seems terribly afraid to make a film that’s actually about masculinity because masculinity always also about misogyny. This is true even if you attempt to sidestep it via homoerotics (as in Maggots and Men, a 2009 soviet fantasy that holds the distinction of being the film with the Most Transsexuals Ever, in which a woman only appears by being the offscreen recipient of the letters that comprise the narration). It’s really hard to make a film that valorizes transmasculine community: Adam tries to do so via affectionate parody, and can’t make it work, and even this toothlessness led to a million tumblr posts about bad representation (trans men would never act like men!).* The backlash to the film kind of ruined Rhys Ernst’s career: in the oral history of the film, he concludes with the hope that trans audiences are ready for more transgressive cinema than they were in 2019.
I think they probably are, if the breakthrough of Castration Movie is anything to go by. Louise Weard and Liz Purchell have started talking about Trans Cinema as if it’s a sort of national cinema (Weard has been trying to coin the term “third gender cinema,” lol). Everyone is very interested in bad depictions of nasty freaks using ugly cameras. I feel curious about whether this will result in “good movies.” Sometimes it feels like a lateral move, to go from a categorical fixation on “good representation” to one on “bad representation.” Ultimately I don’t know how interested I am in edginess. What I actually love, what I wanted more of in Adam, was inside baseball. The ugly parts of the community can emerge with the beauty in equal measure: nothing is more incisive than love and attention.
*Having now seen Dog Movie (2023), I think Henry Hanson is actually pretty interested in these dynamics, I just unfortunately would also like a film that looks good :( legalize white balance!
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