Tony award-winning Broadway star and fashion icon Billy Porter makes his directorial debut with Anything’s Possible, a new coming of age tale now available on Amazon Prime. Eva Reign plays Kelsa, a trans girl entering her final year of high school. The start of the school year can be a mix of hope and dread. Thankfully for Kelsa she has a lot of things already figured out: a couple of very fashionable best friends, a loving mom, a deep interest in animals, and a budding YouTube channel where she can express herself somewhat privately.
The YouTube channel allows her to follow her passion for animals. For her small audience of about 200 subscribers she also discusses her life as a trans person, including her experience taking hormone blockers. This online outlet allows her to just be herself in her public life at a Pittsburgh high school (Porter happens to be a Pittsburgh native). The film walks the fine line of a story featuring a person from an underrepresented group. How do you make it about the individual person and not just the aspects of their lives that make them different?
Kelsa is vibrant, confident and fun. She meets Khal (Abubakr Ali) in art class. On the surface he’s a shy, sensitive boy from an Egyptian family. He has a reputation for being incredibly kind, saving other people’s art projects just because. They get paired up to paint portraits of each other. Khal is the first to start falling. He creates a dazzling image of Kelsa that takes her aback a bit. Especially because her drawing of him is just hair and an ear with a completely blank face. She remains unaware of Khal’s feelings though. As she tells her subscribers, it’s hard to begin to think about dating in an environment where her classmates know “all her tea”. She fears people will want to date her for the woke points. Maybe she can start to date when she goes off to college, a new environment with new people. This poses its own issues of identity though.
Much of the couple’s coming together happens through some light online stalking. “Perpetually nice” Khal takes a break from offering thoughtful relationship advice on reddit to google Kelsa and find her YouTube channel. Kelsa meanwhile hides the fact from her friends that Khal appears first in her Instagram stories.
Screenwriter Ximena García Lecuona’s dialogue is very funny throughout and the students talk like real people despite their impeccable fashions. I have puzzled over one joke since watching the movie though. It comes at just three minutes into the runtime. I don’t know what it means. Here it is. Kelsa’s friend Chris (Kelly Lamor Wilson) tells her that all she ate last night was a box of mac and cheese. “It’s all Mike knows how to cook. He’s like ‘I don’t cook, I grill’. It’s like shut up. Experiment with gay porn already.” Maybe the performative masculinity of grilling is homoerotic?
Ali and Reign have great chemistry as Kelsa and Khal. They fall for the person without worrying too much what it all means. Complications come in the form of Kelsa’s friend Em (Courtnee Carter) who had a crush on Khal before Kelsa got together with him. What starts as the silent treatment turns into something much more sinister. Em gets Kelsa banned from the women’s change rooms and washrooms. Khal’s friend Otis (Grant Reynolds) meanwhile makes constant transphobic comments about his relationship with Kelsa.
Kelsa’s other best friend Chris organizes a demonstration in school to defend her but it feels performative. She also worries that Khal’s motivated to date her because of the aforementioned woke points. In a meeting with the principal, Em suddenly decides to drop her complaint about Kelsa, reverting back to a version of her character that makes more sense. This storyline with Em feels a little inorganic or jammed in to create conflict. But in the hopes of reaching as wide an audience as possible, it does highlight the struggles and discrimination faced by trans people. Anything’s Possible is a fun, uplifting movie that works towards a day where a story with a trans character doesn’t necessarily have to be about the fact that they are trans.
© 2020-2022. UniversalCinema Mag.