Verdict: A gripping, true-life horror story about what happens when girls will be boys.

Details: Starring Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny. Directed by Kimberly Peirce. Rated R for sex, language, nudity and violence. 1 hour, 54 minutes.

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Review: It was Quentin Crisp, I think, who pointed out that when men masquerade as women, it's funny (drag queens, "Some Like It Hot"), but when women pretend to be men, it isn't (think of Shakespeare's shipwrecked Viola swaggering for survival in Illyria).

That observation is given wrenching validation in "Boys Don't Cry," a slightly fictionalized version of the true story of Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old woman from Lincoln, Neb., who fiercely felt that her true identity was male. Unable to afford a sex-change operation, she cut her hair short, stuffed a sock into her jeans, called herself Brandon Teena and, like so many outsiders before her, reinvented herself by heading for the frontier (in this case, rural Nebraska).

There, Brandon (Hilary Swank) fell in with a crowd of hard-drinking rednecks and was accepted as a man. She dutifully — ecstatically, you might say — went through the various male rites of passage required of her. Fistfights in a bar. Bumper-skiing from the back of a pickup truck while blind drunk. And, inevitably, falling for the prettiest girl (Chloe Sevigny) in their crowd.

But the consequences of being found out were catastrophic. Once Brandon was revealed as a female, she crossed the line from pal to victim. Her horrifying fate — and remember, this actually happened — came at the hands of her alleged "buddies." One is a hotheaded ex-convict (Peter Sarsgaard) with "issues of impulse control," the other (Brendan Sexton III) his dimwitted sidekick.

"Boys Don't Cry" is director and co-writer Kimberly Peirce's first feature, and her command of such complex subject matter is thrilling. Her film is intense, disorienting, yet rawly believable. Sevigny, Sarsgaard and Sexton do excellent work, never condescending to country-fried cliches as they roam the dead-end "trailer trash" milieu that their characters inhabit.

But almost by necessity, the movie rises or falls on the credibility of the lead character. Swank's performance is a stunner. Previously known for her work as a single mother on "Beverly Hills, 90210," Swank miraculously conveys the difference between a girl pretending to be a boy and a girl who truly thinks she's a boy. Or, perhaps more to the point, yearns for the freedom and range of identities of being a boy. Of feeling more in tune with James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" than Natalie Wood.

"Boys Don't Cry" isn't a perfect film. It's too unrelenting, a little too low-budget rough around the edges (at times, it suggests those beyond-the-pale 1970s horror flicks like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"). But it's also a remarkable achievement — one of those movies that remind us that truth isn't just stranger than fiction; it's often bleaker as well.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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