Reviews

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  ★★★½ review by tenzin on Letterboxd

  I really just spent almost 2 hours looking at James Franco and Emma Roberts because I'm too lazy to read a damn wikipedia article. for those who have better things to do, here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Glatze, smh

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  ★★★★ review by Greg on Letterboxd

  zachary quinto has the worst taste in men

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  ★★★★ review by Jason Alley on Letterboxd

  A compelling bio-pic about Michael Glatze, a confident gay-rights activist and writer who became a born again Christian who preaches against homosexuality. It's a nearly incomprehensible transformation to imagine a person going through, but the film somewhat surprisingly makes a kind of sense out of it, and while it's clear that director Justin Kelly's stance is a skeptical one, the film rarely feels judgmental or condemnatory.

  James Franco plays Glatze and it's an excellent, nuanced performance, and Zachary Quinto is just as good as his one-time boyfriend Benoit (who wrote the magazine article upon which the film is based). Emma Roberts, very good as always, enters the story late as Rebekah, the woman whom Glatze meets at Bible school and eventually marries.

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  ★★★½ review by Brian Koukol on Letterboxd

  The expectation for a film of this nature would be to start with the repressed religious nut and follow their blossoming into a complete person who is true to themselves. I Am Michael progresses the other way around and is all the more compelling for it. It creates a very distressing watch, but that's rather the point. Franco is pretty great here, playing two sides of a very thick coin and exploring an established truism by portraying its inverse. Human beings are weird, complicated creatures and this definitely captures that fact.

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  ★★★★★ review by John on Letterboxd

  James Franco, never averse to taking professional risks, plays a young man who undergoes an unexpected psychological conversion leading to profound changes in his personal life and identity. Justin Kelly's evenhanded approach to the controversial subject matter turns the notion of a "religious film" on its head and makes the work far more interesting than your typical proselytism project.

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