Steadfast by K.L. Noone

Author:K.L. Noone [K.L. Noone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Character Bleed Bonus Features

“Steadfast Combines History and Heart Into Triumph”: A Film Review

Jillian Poe’s latest directorial effort, Steadfast is at once familiar and unfamiliar: a Regency romance set against the Napoleonic War, full of ballroom scenes and lavish costumes, crackling with politics and passion. It’s (extremely) loosely based on the 1940s novel of the same name, which in turn was based on the historical Will Crawford’s surviving letters and notes, and the romance is real in more than one way—assuming you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve seen the stories about on-set melodrama: Colby Kent and Jason Mirelli hooking up, being injured, falling in love, and from all reports being blissfully happy.

Leaving the behind-the-scenes drama aside, the question is: is it a good film?

The answer is unequivocally yes.

It’s more than good. It’s a brave film, in the best ways: not only in telling a historical gay love story—and it is very, very gay; Jillian Poe and her cast don’t shy away from sex scenes—but in the raw emotion and power of the storytelling and the relationship. It’s the kind of film that gets remembered as a landmark: what good filmmaking can do. And it’s worth seeing, not only for the attention to period detail or the reminder that gay people (and Black people, Indian people, and others; we see an impressively diverse London, especially among Will’s Home Office fellow recruits) have always existed in history, but for the sheer emotional experience. Steadfast is a romance, unashamedly so, and it wants you to fall in love, and you will.

The casting and the script are spot-on, to start.

Jillian Poe has her favorite stable of actors, so some familiar faces won’t be a surprise. Colby Kent, also a producer, and given co-writing credit with Ben Rogers, stars as Will Crawford—Rogers and Jillian Poe have independently confirmed that Colby did on-set rewrites, which means most of what we see is likely his. We’ve discussed Colby and the industry and uncredited script work at length back when that news broke, so here I’ll just say that Colby is a better writer than any of us realized—good at knowing and utilizing the source material, but also paring down, choosing the exact right word for each moment, giving his fellow actors dialogue that sounds effortlessly natural. Odds on a Best Adapted Screenplay award or two? Pretty high, I’d say.

Speaking of Colby Kent, he’s always been quietly excellent on screen, often underrated (that Academy Award loss to Owen Heath last year should’ve gone the other way, no offense to Owen, who is also generally excellent), and equally capable of adorable clumsiness or aristocratic decadence. You could argue that playing young and wealthy and vulnerable and gay is exactly in his wheelhouse and hardly a stretch, and you might be right—but you would also be wrong.

It’s an award-winning performance. It’s a master class in complex character acting. It’s compelling and dramatic and the core of the film, at least half of it, more on which later.

Will Crawford—in ill

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