The notorious case of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb-two young, gay University of Chicago students whose 1924 thrill-killing of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks captured headlines as the “crime of the century”-is daringly reimagined in Tom Kalin’s subversive New Queer Cinema touchstone. Smart, coolly stylized, and emotionally jarring, SWOON employs haunting black-and-white visuals and experimental narrative techniques to explore the social, judicial, and psychological forces that acted upon these two lives.
