Any Day Now

West Hollywood, 1979. Opposites attract when hard-bitten, soft-centred drag performer Rudy (Alan Cumming) locks eyes with decent, closeted lawyer Paul (Garret Dillahunt) across a raucous bar. But romance is diverted when Rudy’s feckless sex-worker neighbour gets busted, leaving her disabled 14-year-old son Marco (Isaac Levya) in the lurch. The stage is set for a legal custody tussle with timely resonance for the still-contentious issue of gay parenting and LGBT rights in general. Thanks to Cummings’s charisma and Levya’s adorability, ‘Any Day Now’ is an engaging and emotive weepie, but it’s unremarkable as drama. Structural social injustice is the only source of tension here: no character we care for is allowed more than a whisper of a negative attribute; no narrative hurdle gives more than a moment’s pause to the story’s trajectory. Nor do director Travis Fine and cinematographer Rachel Morrison demonstrate much visual flair; if anything, the pin-sharp HD photography diminishes the period feel. Rousing as a tale of saintly gays against the system, ‘Any Day Now’ is less stirring as cinema.