Review: Elliot Page delivers a deeply moving performance in 'Close to You'

As a movie, "Close to You," now only in theaters, can feel clumsy and contrived. As a search for identity, it can soar on waves of raw feeling thanks to the deeply felt, deeply moving performance of Elliot Page in a role he wears like a second skin.

Page plays Sam, a trans man living in Toronto who returns after four years to his suburban hometown on Lake Ontario. The occasion is ostensibly the birthday of his father. In actuality, it's a reunion with family members he hasn't seen or been close to since his transition.

Though Page teamed on the script with director Dominic Savage, "Close to You" -- which features many awkward scenes of improvisation -- is not even close to being a biography. For that, read "Pageboy," the acclaimed 2023 memoir in which Page is bluntly candid about his fears regarding gender dysphoria and his hard-won path to happiness.

There are issues galore for Sam that Page, 37, delineates with intuitive brilliance. An Oscar nominee at 20 for playing the title role in "Juno," Page excels in films both intimate ("Hard Candy") and epic ("Inception"). And he deftly handles the emotional demands rocking Sam's world in "Close to You."

Sam's mother Miriam (a terrific Wendy Crewson) offers open-hearted support, but sometimes trips up on pronouns. His father Jim (Peter Outerbridge) is outwardly more progressive. But Sam can't help feeling that he's "just a disappointment to them."

Sam's siblings Kate (Janet Porter), Megan (Alex Paxton-Beesley) and Michael (Daniel Maslany) push hard to show they're in Sam's corner, but shake their heads in disbelief when Sam insists that he's happy. There is nothing subtle about the reactions of transphobic brother-in-law Paul (David Reale), an uber-jerk whose hostile accusations reflect much of the outside world.

These characters feel more like mouthpieces than flesh-and-blood humans. But the sting feels fresh when Sam hits them with a question that cuts to the core of his story: "Why weren't you this worried about me when I was actually not OK?"

Why indeed? The power of these scenes is undeniable. As is Sam's reunion with Katherine (the sublime deaf actor Hillary Baack), his once-closest friend who is now married with children. When Sam walks out on his family, ready to catch the next train home, he first reconnects with Katherine in a scene of surpassing tenderness.

You can feel the connection between the two actors (they worked together in a 2013 film called "The East"), just as you feel the bond between Sam and Katherine, as it touches on moments of sexual and psychological intimacy.

Page and Baack are so good that you long for a more fully developed look into their characters. But the film's improv nature and the decision to set the story as virtually a day in Sam's life frustrates our longing to know more, to go deeper.

And yet Page leads as ever with his heart. For all the narrative bumps, Page lets us see Sam as he opens up to the world, no matter how it hurts. Even when the film goes soft, the bruised beauty of his performance hits you hard.