Love, Simon is a 2018 coming-of-age romantic comedy-drama directed by Greg Berlanti, based on Becky Albertalli's novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. It stars Nick Robinson as Simon Spier, a closeted gay high schooler who strikes up an anonymous email correspondence with another closeted student at his school, only to have those emails discovered and used to blackmail him. It's worth stating up front why this film matters: it was the first film from a major Hollywood studio to build itself around a gay teen romance, and that significance is felt throughout. Films like this quietly shed light on what life can actually be like for people who aren't heterosexual, the fear, the shame, and the very real risk of losing family and friends who won't accept you. (As a small aside, Robinson also headlines Voicemails for Isabelle, which I reviewed just yesterday, so this has been a very Nick Robinson couple of days.)

What the film does well, it does with real heart. It takes a genuinely frightening experience and wraps it in a warm, bittersweet, ultimately hopeful glow, and for the most part it earns that tone rather than cheating it. The whole cast is strong, and nothing about the performances pulled me out of the story. The emotional throughline holds. Everything is lovely, right up until the stretch where Simon's life comes apart, which is appropriately not lovely at all, and then the film gently guides you back to lovely again.

The standout, without question, is the parents. Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel are wonderful as Simon's mum and dad, and the way they respond to his coming out is the most moving material in the entire film. Garner's big speech is the emotional peak, and it lands exactly as hard as it's meant to.

Now, in the interest of honesty, this film is extremely cliché, and it runs on rails from start to finish. I had the central mystery, the identity of Simon's anonymous pen-pal, worked out inside the first thirty minutes, and I was entirely correct, even as the film treated the reveal as a genuine surprise. Normally that would frustrate me, but here it didn't, because the film commits to its beats with such sincerity that the familiarity reads as comforting rather than lazy. It knows what it is, and it delivers it warmly.

My one real gripe, and the thing that costs it points, is the runtime. At nearly two hours, it's simply too long. There is a tighter, sharper version of this exact story that sacrifices none of the emotional impact and trims a good twenty minutes of excess, and I wish they'd made that version.