Modern Family – ‘Any Day Now’ features great performance, flawed script

From left. Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva and Alan Cumming star in "Any Day Now." Music Box Films photos
From left. Garret Dillahunt, Isaac Leyva and Alan Cumming star in “Any Day Now.”
Music Box Films photos

Any Day Now” sounds like Lifetime movie-of-the-week melodramatic hokum: a couple fight to adopt a child after it is abandoned by its drug-addicted mother. But in Travis Fine’s decent and occasionally moving film, there’s more to this set-up. The couple is a drag queen and a closeted attorney; the child has Down syndrome, and the setting is West Hollywood of the late 1970s.

Veteran actor Alan Cumming plays Rudy, who we first see glammed up and lip sync’ing disco hits alongside two other drag queens on stage in a gay bar. Watching him from the bar is polyester-suited Paul (Garret Dillahunt), a district attorney just starting to find his identity. After a sexual dalliance, it’s love at first sight for Rudy and Paul. Meanwhile, Rudy winds up looking after his neighbor’s child after the cops take the mother away for drug use and fourteen-year-old Marco (Isaac Leyva) wanders away from Family Services custody and finds his way home.

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