Guy Lodge Film CriticEarly on in “Cicada,” a secondary character drops the old maxim, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that art is never finished, only abandoned.
It’s a pointed moment of self-awareness in a film of many. Writer-director-producer-editor-star Matthew Fifer’s debut feature processes lived experience into a cracked, anguished work of autofiction, raggedly cathartic and needfully unresolved as it sketches young queer lives in different stages of self-acceptance.
Delicately tracing the first summery blush of romance between two Brooklyn men respectively hindered by their own private trauma, “Cicada” is self-indulgent in the most forgivable, even fruitful, way, with stretches of nervy improvisation and everyday poetry that feel.