[8.5/10] This is just a fascinating movie on so many levels. For one, it’s fascinating as a chance to learn about a particular subculture. Just getting to immerse yourself in the different houses, the different trends, the different rules and practices, is completely engrossing. The rich ecosystem and history and web of norms that connect these people is a potent topic all its own, and hearing it described and detailed is engaging.

But it’s also fascinating as a story of people held at the margins of society who build their families and communities there. As the interviews make clear, these people want mainstream stardom and success. But given how much of an uphill climb that is given their skin color and sexuality (despite sustaining, pie-in-the-sky hopes frequently expressed), they construct their own version of it, within their own space, to help fill that need.

It’s also fascinating as a story of privilege. It’s not that the people featured in the documentary possess it, but it is very much what they aspire to. Some of that is in the costuming and performative elements of the balls, where there’s plain imitation of pop cultural signifiers of style and success. Some of it is in the monetary element, where so many of these people are poor or struggling, and so the notion of financial security, both protecting it and fantasizing about it, becomes one of the central ones.

And then there’s the aspiration toward a funhouse mirror version of mainstream (read: straight, white, and wealthy) American life in the 1980s. The film juxtaposes the places the queens and children occupy with images of O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E and paradigmatic Reagan-era prosperity. It’s striking how aware so many of these folks are of their lack of privilege and how much they reach toward it and yearn for it, even as they have built their own spaces.

That’s the heartening part of a film that has a certain grimness in the background. These are folks with few places to turn, who nevertheless find that familial bond and support with one another. Most importantly, they find acceptance, the place to express their truest selves and, even when donning a different guise, express their hopes and dreams in a place that will support them. That support is inspiring, and the most energizing part of the documentary.

And yet, in just the two-year jump, *Paris Is Burning* gives us untimely death, a changing of the guard, and even a slow but sure mainstreaming of what was once an underground necessity. You can see the older mothers lamenting the changes, remarking on how things were different in their day, expressing the same “end of an era” sentiment that all communities feel at times of change.

I think that’s what’s so striking about the movie for me. The lives depicted here could hardly be more removed from my own, and yet there’s something universal to them, not just in grief and beefs and found families, but in the way that these social and fraternal bonds come with their own changing of the seasons, old guards and new, wishes and wants that fade into the next.

Of course what gives it power is also its specificity to this time and place and group. As a slice of life for the LGBTQ community in 1980s New York City, the movie is just as engrossing. It’s interesting to hear different members of the scene offer differing perspectives on sex changes, on whether they see themselves as women or as men presenting as women or as something else entirely. It’s interesting to see the veneration of “realness” and passing in some quarters at the same time self-expression is praised. And it’s also quietly harrowing to see the warts and all depiction of people who’ve been rejected by their families finding ways to survive.

It is, in short, a profoundly human movie. The characters here are colorful, which makes the talking head interviews especially unique and entertaining. But it is also an unvarnished look at a community in flux, with its own unwritten rules and its own American dream, watching both change and slip away before their eyes and ours. The realness on display in the film's runtime matches the realness on the runway, and makes *Paris Is Burning* a powerful and memorable documentary.