The early 90s. Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank) attempts an experiment. Binding her breasts and cropping her hair, the androgynous petty thief decides she can pass as a man. Adopting the less than subtle sobriquet of Brandon Teena, she runs away to depressed, redneck Fall City, Nebraska where she naturally falls in with the ex-cons and white trash. And Lana (Chloë Sevigny), the precocious teenager who steals Brandon’s heart. But the more she integrates herself into Lana's extended family, the more it becomes inevitable that Brandon will be revealed for who and what she really is.

If much of Peirce's bleak, uncompromising film imagines life for the real Brandon Teena, reality and fiction do tragically collide in their respective fates. And if the retribution that meets her in a remote Nebraskan farmhouse isn't clear from the outset, its chill inevitability is. Without it Boys Don't Cry would cease to need to exist.

The film is driven by a powerhouse performance from Swank which, while we never lose sight of Brandon's gender - he/she always looks like a girl playing a boy, and Peirce and Andy Bienen's screenplay never lets us forget it - is never less than convincing. Indeed, once Brandon's identity is revealed, it brilliantly switches our identification: we are more able to accept her as a man once the characters have her gender placed beyond doubt. Smartly too Peirce and Bienan never take more than cursory steps towards explaining Brandon's psychopathology. The real Brandon Teena was dead long before anyone could take that kind of an interest, and the screenplay sensibly avoids explaining too much before Fall City. In a film that is all about the acceptance of surface images, the audience has to learn to accept Brandon up-front for what she is.

The remaining cast are no less accomplished. Sevigny is as good as we've come to expect (she was, after all, the only one to escape the execrable, reactionary Kids covered in any glory), while Alison Folland offers sterling support as her fiercely protective mother. Better yet is Peter Sarsgaard as the violent, unpredictable John, an ex-con who lives at Lana's mother's home and pals around with the only marginally less dangerous Tom (Brendan Sexton III). It's their eventual discovery and the confusion it provokes that calls down the retribution that does not only for Brandon but their friend, the innocent, naive single mother Candace (a terrific Alicia Goranson).

Peirce's visual technique is to shoot most of this with grit in her lens, true to the monotonous gas stations and dust-clogged highways of her location. And all the better to highlight the occasional moments of time-lapse poetry that punctuate the picture like the parched, beer-fuelled dreams of its characters. Brandon's invite to Lana has not even been to escape the trailer parks but to start one of their very own. And yet even that is stolen away in the stomach-tightening whirlwind of the closing quarter. Dreams are all some people have, this outstanding film seems to say, and sometimes that’s just not enough.