This was the last feature film role for the late Robin Williams, so his performance tends to draw our focus. Williams plays Nolan, a married 60-year-old forced to confront his long-closeted homosexuality when he strikes up a naive platonic friendship with a young hustler called Leo (Roberto Aguire). But it’s a curiously opaque performance – all we learn about Nolan is revealed in a chunk of convenient exposition at the end of the second act. There’s no emotional eloquence. This is highlighted in the scenes Williams shares with Kathy Baker, who plays Joy, his wife. Every prickle of doubt, every subtle dig of jealousy plays out in her eyes. It’s fair to say she comprehensively out-acts her co-star in every scene. The film takes a familiar premise – both Eastern Boys and From Afar riff on the same rent boy/father figure dynamic – and neuters it with a chaste central relationship and the kind of wafty, twinkly music like something you might hear in a flotation tank.
