Boys Life 2

This follow-up to the 1995 sampler of gay short films stitches together four more vignettes about the anguish of boy troubles. The pasticcio opens unevenly with Nickolas Perry's "Must Be the Music," the warmed-over story of surburban striplings fretting about love and curfews against the pulsating strobes of an LA nightclub. In Tom DeCerchio's bitterly cathartic "Homophobia's for Dinner," homophobia's for dinner as a volatile gay cop invites a teen punk to sup with his mom, the delightfully gravel-gargling Eileen Brennan. Mark Christopher's poetic "Alkali, Iowa" tills heartache in the heartland with the tale of a young farmer confronting his dad's mysterious past and his own sexuality. The quartet ends irreverently with Peggy Rajski's Oscar-winning black comedy "Trevor," in which a Diana-Ross-obsessed 13-year-old isn't exactly humming "I'm Coming Out" when his classmates discover his crush on a pal. Sometimes contrived but always witty and wistful, Boys Life must go on. At the Avon.

-- Alicia Potter