96 min | PG-13 | July 22, 2022 | Amazon Studios
Kelsa is a trans high school senior who wants what every teenager wants. A boy named Khal likes her, and that simple fact detonates the social order around them. Billy Porter directs a teen romance that treats its heroine like a person instead of a cause.
Kelsa is a trans high school senior in Pittsburgh navigating her final year. She runs a YouTube channel, plans for college, and wants a normal romance. Khal, a boy in her art class, develops a crush on her and acts on it. The film is a teen rom-com that follows the conventional beats of first love. What sets it apart is its refusal to make Kelsa’s transness the source of her drama. The conflict comes from jealousy, friendship, and the ordinary cruelty of high school, and the film insists that a trans girl gets to star in that familiar story.
Eva Reign plays Kelsa with warmth and self-possession. She delivers the to-camera vlog monologues without making them feel like exposition. Reign carries the film by letting Kelsa be confident in public and uncertain in private. Abubakr Ali plays Khal as nervous and decent, a teenager who likes a girl and overthinks every move. Courtnee Carter plays Em, Kelsa’s best friend, and turns a subplot about a love triangle into the film’s most honest depiction of how teenagers wound each other. Renée Elise Goldsberry plays Selene, Kelsa’s mother, with a protectiveness that reads as both love and overreach.
Billy Porter directs his first feature from a script by Ximena García Lecuona. The film leans into bright primary colors and a saturated palette that signals its optimism in every frame. Kelsa’s bedroom and the school hallways pop with deliberate, candy-toned production design. The vlog sequences break the fourth wall and let Reign address the audience directly, which gives Kelsa an interiority the plot does not always slow down to provide. The pacing stumbles when the script reaches for its third-act misunderstanding, the oldest device in the genre.
Anything’s Possible knows exactly what kind of movie it is and commits to it. It is a sweet, earnest teen romance with a trans lead at the center and no apology for the formula. The script trusts that the audience wants Kelsa to win, and it never manufactures cynicism to seem more serious. The familiar genre machinery is both its limitation and its point. Porter makes a movie that hands a trans teenager the same dumb, hopeful love story everyone else already got.