Critics reviews

Interior. Leather Bar isn't really about gay sex or S&M or the missing footage fromCruising. It isn't even about Cruising at all. It reflects the very anxiety it claims to challenge... There are just a handful of explicit scenes in Interior. Leather Bar, and it's unclear which, if any of them, correspond to anything that was excised from Cruising.

The most keenly observed moments subsume the discomfort of participating in "Franco's faggot project" into a larger anxiety about making it in the business; Interior. Leather Bar.might have been called Gay. For Pay. As for the unabashed homosexuals on set, notably the "real-life" couple willing to fuck on camera, the pleasure they take in each other's bodies is the least affected thing on view, a rebuke to the flaccid identity games being mobilized by a movie star with a boner for queer theory.

...Mr. Franco and Mr. Mathews have set out to reimagine this excised material [from Friedkin's Cruising]. They've done just that in a movie about a movie that turns out to be something of an intellectual house of mirrors. Coming in a densely packed 60 minutes that could easily have been extended, "Interior. Leather Bar." — the title mimics a screenplay scene heading — is simultaneously an act of creation and deconstruction.

The most interesting angle here is the role the Oz the Great and Powerful star allows himself: a glib, cell-phone-hypnotized weekend auteur who throws around words like heteronormative, yet abandons his nervous Pacino-playing actor, Val (Val Lauren), right at the moment of truth. The endgame can't be taken seriously: Is Franco bettered by witnessing gay sex? Is Val, lonely and driving at night, somehow compromised? The vagueness feels like a term paper you have to grade.

Franco's arguments are as manifestly condescending to straight guys as they are to gay ones, but he's self-aware enough to frame them against the original Cruising, a text whose reputation has inevitably morphed with the times. With Mathews's help, Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.

Even when Franco is prattling on about his burning desire to liberate moviegoers from their psychosexual chains—as if he's the handsome film star equivalent of Lawrence of Arabia or the guy from "Avatar," a straight messiah-liberator helping the impotent queer nation touch hearts and minds—it somehow works. It's self-aware and self-deprecating. "Cruising" is a safari just as this movie is a safari. Its tour guide is an interloper trying to convince the natives that he's one of them.

Franco has terrible taste in pastimes -- and regrettably we are privy to all of them. His latest fleeting avocation is Interior. Leather Bar., an hour-long experiment in speculative queer fiction. It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit...

What follows is... a muddled, half-thought-out inquiries into male sexuality and Franco worship. Interior. Leather Bar. becomes less a re-creation of Friedkin's "lost" footage than a haphazard making-of document (some, if not all, of which is scripted), a meta conceit with increasingly diminishing returns.

Franco's contribution is a glib, faux-reflexive effort in which he performs his own enthusiasm for the project for his" manager" (who begs him not to do it) and his collaborator Travis Mathews (a "straight actor" who performs a kind of Pacinoesque fall down the rabbit hole of gay sexuality). There is the promise of an intellectual endeavor (Franco cites Roland Barthes early on, a propos of nothing), but it soon collapses into empty preening and self-satisfaction.

As a cinematic footnote to the Frank Ocean moment, it is a pleasurable gender-fuck as much for the audience as the putatively gay and straight participants on the screen.

No, the creatively restless star/co-director does not don dead-animal hides and make out with dudes. Yes, he does prove that a life of perpetually treating stardom as a performance-art piece can belch out some interesting food for thought, even if said meals tend to be somewhat undercooked and overflavored.