At the heart of the new film The Inspection, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday, is a conventional story we’ve seen play out in myriad other movies. A lost and searching young man, Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), joins the military and endures the pains and horrors of boot camp as his resolve quavers and hardens. The variation of this film, from writer-director Elegance Bratton, is that French is gay; he enlisted in the hopes of pleasing his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union), who kicked him out of the house ten years earlier, leaving him homeless. 

That’s a particular military narrative we haven’t seen much before, one that looks back at the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and finds one life both clarified and confused in a liminal state of existence. (French’s experience closely mirrors Bratton’s own.) It is a worthy subject for a drama, though a simple recitation of hardship might risk becoming starchy and too heavy with theme. Bratton, though, is not solely interested in a litany of struggle. He fills The Inspection with style, with spiky humor and alluring edge. It’s a promising feature debut. 

There’s both sadness and something relatably funny in the way French tries to butch himself up, which Pope renders with nuance. Bratton lets the homoerotic fever of these young, fit men living in such close confines dance at the edges of a few scenes. I wish he explored that more, though. Not out of prurience, exactly, but because delving further into French’s incredibly conflicted psychology, and that of the whole military, would only add to the film’s vital specificity. 

French gets a bit lost in the movie’s survey of boot camp life, just another grunt in a platoon of hopefuls aching to prove themselves. The Inspection need not necessarily be an anti-military film, nor one that positions French in full diametric opposition to the military’s practices and policies. Bratton successfully illustrates how the fact of French’s being and the identity he’s aspiring to gradually coalesce into a changed person. But there could be more particular friction, between French’s interior life and the outward one he is trying to step into. 

To Bratton’s credit, The Inspection doesn’t trade in easy stereotypes. There is the expected legacy recruit asshole (McCaul Lombardi) who torments French in order to prove his own prowess. He’s given some shading, though, Bratton extending a basic empathy toward another young person trying to assert himself, just from a different angle. A drill sergeant who pushes his training too far, played with credible bark by Bokeem Woodbine, is allowed some dimension too. We’re left questioning whether there is good intention buried under his hectoring abuse, because Bratton and Woodbine leave room for complicated interpretation. 

The same goes for Inez, who can shift from monstrous to tender in the space of a breath. That’s a precarious balance ably struck by Union, who strips away any movie-star glam but never seems to preen in that imagined daring. Her few scenes with Pope are the film at its most startlingly personal. Bratton’s relationship with his own mother remains fraught, and he generously lets us into that tenuous and difficult bond. That act of sharing will probably resonate with more viewers than will the film’s more perfunctory military process. 

The Inspection feels like a cleanse for its filmmaker, a recounting that, one hopes, will finally give some sense of closure to a challenging period in Bratton’s life. Yet there is always an awareness of the audience in the film, of a broader range of experience, that is often lacking in memoir films like this. Which augurs good things for Bratton’s career to come. Now that he’s told this foundational story, I hope he feels he can seek out new and more far-ranging topics. His talent is considerably evident in The Inspection, the product of training and reflection, yes, but also something innate that, it seems, no smothering force could suppress forever.