I had no intention of reviewing this movie until I read some of the scathing, even nasty, reviews, and it's always been my feeling reviews should be informative, critical, and constructive. "Come Into Your Own" suffers from most of the pitfalls of first-time indie film making and feels like a film school thesis project with its low budget, rudimentary camera work, script, sometimes amateurish acting, and lose editing. It's modest strength stems from it's love and need to tell its story. It's a very personal film for the writer-director-actor about the bumpy road all of us take toward identity. Indeed the script can be opaque at times (feeling undeveloped and poorly etched) but the confusion and conflict of the lead is engaging, and in today's world that increasingly challenges a simply binary approach to sexuality seems authentic. I did not think the ending a cop-out. We might want as audience members to have the lead choose and be happy, but that's clearly not the point of the film. The film ends in the ambiguity of beginning a more honest and selfaware journey, and coming into your own is messy and complex for the artist and for all of us. We can only demand of ourselves that in each step we grow better both as human beings and better as artists, honing our craft to produce professional quality work.
