Jordan Danger’s directorial debut God Save the Queens, now on at Tribeca, is a small, moving piece of entertainment about a quartet of drag queens who meet on a group therapy retreat and proceed to tell the stories of how and why they arrived there. The film comprises several vignettes following Gigi (Jordan Michael Green), Marmalade (Kelly Mantle), and duo Rita (Laganja Estranja) and Stevie (Alaska Thunderfuck) as they navigate personal relationships and professional hang-ups.
Gigi is a young queen just starting out, attempting to get her solo show off the ground. Marmalade is an aging performer preparing for a show, and dealing with the somewhat invasive interest of a young man living next door. Rita and Stevie are drag performers at a local bar who have had a recent falling out but must put the band back together to appear on a talent show.
The overall tone of God Save the Queens is light and humorous, replete with snarky comebacks, extreme personalities, and a Black woman who may or may not be God. But there’s an underlying understanding of drag subculture and the personalities that make it up that helps the film evade simply being a broad comic chamber piece. Three out of the four leads will be recognizable from RuPaul’s Drag Race, but the film itself deals with the less glamorous world of drag, where performers scramble for spots in small clubs, attempt to manage thorny personal relationships, and deal with unsupportive (or overly supportive families and friends. There’s a realism to God Save the Queens that’s surprising, thanks to Danger’s assured, noninvasive directing style and script, and the nuanced performances from the four leads. But it’s Mantle’s performance as Marmalade/Louis who stands out, providing the film with its final vignette and an emotional speech that breaks the back of a culture that so prizes youth and beauty. For the extreme personalities of the characters and the occasional bouts of broad comedy, this film looks at the reality of day-to-day life of people searching for success in a simultaneously beloved and derided art form.
The weakness of God Save the Queens lies in the framing narrative of the four major characters attending a group therapy retreat. The conceit is introduced partway through the film, after we’ve already met all four, and mostly consists of the leads telling the remainder of their stories, first to two counselors and then to a woman who seems to appear from nowhere. The concept is a good one, but underused, and might have been either largely dispensed with or introduced earlier without damaging the overall point of the film.
But this is a comparatively slight weakness in a film that’s so charming and poignant that it’s easy to forgive some flaws of narrative. The leads are all excellent, funny without being caricatures, emotional without becoming maudlin. The vignettes fit together well, and Danger shows an inherent understanding of pacing and pathos that makes the audience very invested in the outcome of apparently mundane stories.
There’s something wonderful and refreshing about a film featuring drag queens that does not entirely rely on broad comedy or uber-serious subplots. God Save the Queens is about workaday drag queens—people trying to find a foothold in their industry, repairing friendships, dealing with aging (and ageism), and embracing each other and the self-expression so fundamental to their art, and still so subversive.
God Save the Queens is available to stream on Tribeca At Home.