Directed by Silas Howard, Harry Dodge
Shy is a transgender man who leaves his small town after the death of his father, and heads to the big city to live a life of crime. Along the way, he encounters Valentine, a quirky adoptee, in search of his birth mother. An immediate kinship is sparked between these men and they become partners in crime.
USA USA 
Be gay be trans do crime
The mixture of gentle companionship with the rough edges of a harsh world creates a sense of doom, a sense that nothing good will ever happen, a sense that forces so much bigger than these beautiful gender-bent survivors demand their failure, their agony, their turmoil in exchange for any moment of sweetness they steal out of the hell that is life below the poverty line and outside the confines of normal society. These ill-graced but earnest souls have a childlike energy to them as they plan stupid heists and engage in petty crimes that only a cruel world would give a damn about; it makes the sense of doom that much more painful and the moments of happiness even more…
Forever grateful for filmmakers who just fucking make the thing.
a cowpunk stream of consciousness ultra lo-fi work of surreal buddy-comedy cinema centered around and created by transmasc/nonbinary friends. there's nothing else like it, and there probably never will be. i feel compelled to get gushy and personal talking about this because it really does feel like a friend to me moreso than maybe any other film i've ever seen, and i was kind of on the verge of breaking down in tears at several points as i watched it tonight.
2021 Queer Film Challenge #17: a film by Silas Howard.
This is Americana. Not the mom and apple pie kind, not the eagles and guns kind, but an anarchist Americana of outsiders, like a queer John Dos Passos for the 21st century, or Gregg Araki on a budget of Ziploc bags full of quarters. I'm talking punk rock and minimalist country blues, neon signs and surveillance cameras, petty theft and gay bars. Here in the US a car represents freedom, so go ahead and steal one. A motel promises safety from a mental "health" system that's just another face of the criminal "justice" system, because both are handmaidens of capital. Only the other freaks will appreciate your slick David Lynch…
the power of queer cinema is that it can be totally incompetent on every level, just horrendously written, filmed, edited, and performed, and still feel like a revelation. the more i sit with this the more i like that it's a weird meandering thing beyond category. the characters and situations are genuine, there's an endearing strangeness to everything, and "butches / trans mascs in san francisco" is a weirdly specific subgenre i've come to love (jenni olson! lou sullivan!)
it’s like the non binary transmasc version of the living end and my own private idaho
A quote from J. Halberstam's In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives:
“By Hook or by Crook actually manages to tell a queer story that is more than a queer story by refusing to acknowledge the existence of a straight world. Where the straight world is represented only through its institutions such as the law, the mental institution, or commerce, the queer cinematic world comes to represent a truly localized place of opposition -- an opposition, moreover, that is to be found in committed performances of perversity, madness, and friendship.”
Lovingly angry, impassioned, bold. I was really taken by the relationships that develop in this film, the communion these folks find with one another, and what the film suggests about spaces like mental hospital. Namely, what they do to a person who exists against the dominant forces of this heteropatriarchal culture we’re all living under the constraints of.
This should have a way more prominent place in the new queer cinema canon, the slacker canon, and the scammer canon
be gay, drink tequila, and play with toy shark grabbers.
so intimate and goofy... i love the queer americana &the midwestern blue collar transmasc agenda
this is the first film ive seen starring real trans men and honestly thats enough to make me stan it
