Lincoln Bloom (Shayne Gray), an upper middle-class Jewish kid almost 18 years old, leads a straight life most of the time in Memphis, TN. He has a girl friend Monica (Rachel Zan Huss), goes to dances, and jokes with the guys. But he also has a secret life, in which he's drawn to dark places where he has sex with men he doesn't know. One night, while visiting a gay video arcade, he connects with Ming Nguyen (Thang Chan), aka John, a Vietnamese-born gay man, in his 20s probably, whose father was an African-American US soldier. John invites Lincoln to spend some carefree time with him, and Lincoln takes him to his father's boat. Along the way, John shares his life story and sense of frustration at not belonging in either his homeland or America.
John then convinces Lincoln to take the boat into the Mississippi delta, where setting off some fireworks out of season precipitates betrayal and revenge. After an entire day of hanging out together at various port towns along the river, the pair get in trouble with the police, resulting in a violent falling out. Lincoln returns to Memphis in his boat, looks up Monica, and faces his father's wrath. Meanwhile, John makes his way home as best he can, settles back into his routine as a layabout, and finally seeks out another sexual encounter, with an unexpected conclusion--a murder. We are left with his act of murder without ever understanding what drove him to it, or what really makes him tick. After 95 minutes the film simply ends without a proper resolution.
In this dreamy gay-themed quasi-documentary, the dialogue seems largely improvised, lending the story a certain authenticity. But the movie is muddled and doesn't know what to do with the central relationship, wasting too much time on other subjects. It should have made the storyline with the couple a lot more intense and interesting. When the story lurches into violent melodrama, the sudden change feels like an attempt to yank together its dramatic strands to make a coherent statement. But the change is too abrupt. The end result is a film that's intriguing but frustrating, and leaves too many loose ends dangling. It's a piece of entertainment, which show gays as purely dysfunctional human beings. Directed by Memphis native Ira Sachs, who cast the semi-autobiographical "The Delta" with non-actors after searching the pool halls and watering holes of his hometown for several months. Sachs wrote the screenplay, and Michael Rohatyn composed the music.
