Love, Simon

"Love, Simon" is the story of a teenage boy who is guarding the secret that he is gay in this crowd pleaser of a movie.

17-year-old Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) is a handsome and popular high school senior who lives with the most liberal of parents and a younger sister he actually likes. His dad (Josh Duhamel) who gave him a car�for his last birthday, relies on Simon to help him be the man of the house. It is in every way a perfectly normal middle-class family -- except for the fact�that� Simon is gay, and he cannot find a way to share that fact with anyone.

It turns out to his surprise�(but certainly not ours) that he is not "the only gay in the village" when some�anonymous boy writing on the school gossip website announces that he is gay. Simon, creating a new fake email account, responds, and before long the two young men are corresponding with each other without revealing their identities�and establishing a tight�bond.

Although Simon is paranoid that anyone except his pen pal might discover his secret, he is careless enough to leave their rather intimate correspondence on one of the�school library's computers, which leads him to be being blackmailed. His classmate Martin (Logan Miller)�demands that Simon arrange a date with Abby (Alexandra Shipp), one of his best friends, as a price for his silence. Simon, desperate to keep his sexuality secret, goes along with Martin's demands even though it means betraying his own friendship with Abby and his other close friends.

It naturally all comes to a very sticky impasse when Martin's skullduggery is exposed, as is Simon's sexuality and his shabby treatment of his best friends. To make matters even worse, once Simon's online pal gets wind, he breaks off the correspondence and disappears before Simon can find out exactly who it is he has fallen in love with.

However, in this possibly too perfect world, it's not the fact that Simon is gay that is the issue but the fact he used his friends so shabbily that turns out to be the major problem. It is inevitable from the opening scene that this movie is destined to have the happiest�of happy ends,�so there is no surprise that the entire school is rooting for Simon and the Mystery Man before the final credits roll.

This feel-good flick is directed by (openly gay) Greg Berlanti ("Broken Hearts Club") from a script based on a teen novel by (openly straight) Becky Albertelli. With a talented cast to portray this rather gentrified�drama where everyone keeps their clothes on, never take drugs, or drives when drunk, it's left to the wonderful Natasha Rothwell as Miss Albright, a reluctant drama teacher, to keep it real with her rapid-fire, sardonic�one-liners.�

"Love Simon" will probably not be popular with discerning LGBT audiences who now expect coming out stories to have the heartfelt emotion and grittiness of "God's Own Country," but it�is destined to be a hit amongst teenagers and their parents who like their take on adolescent homosexuality to be seen only through rose-tinted glasses.� �