Will & Harper Is a Daringly Honest Look at Trans Belonging in America
Netflix
In 2017, I spent two months driving across the country in a rental car. I looked at the stars in rural Arkansas with a transgender veteran, played card games with queer kids in Utah, drank coffee in the Rio Grande Valley with nonbinary immigrants, and brunched with a lesbian bar owner in Mississippi. Over time, the fact that I wrote a book about that experience — 2019’s Real Queer America — has become subsumed by the sheer beauty and sacredness of all those memories. So when I heard that Will Ferrell and his trans friend Harper Steele were embarking on their own cross-country odyssey, I knew they were going to have a special experience.
Will & Harper is a revelatory and daringly honest look at the evolving relationship between its two subjects, and also an older trans woman’s affection for her country. Steele, a former head writer on Saturday Night Live and a longtime collaborator of Ferrell’s, publicly came out as a trans woman in 2021 after decades spent in the closet. As Ferrell went on to fame and fortune, her own tastes remained decidedly lowbrow and quintessentially American: she likes dive bars, cheap beer, and eating Pringles in Walmart parking lots. She believes that Natty Light is “the best beer out there.”
When Steele finally decided to live as herself, she questioned whether she’d be able to maintain that same fond relationship with the United States. “I love it so much,” she says in an early interview. “I just don’t know if it loves me back right now.”
Ferrell’s idea, in conjunction with director Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar), was to take Steele across the country, in part to get reacquainted with his old (and now kind of new) friend, but also to serve as a sort of cisgender battering ram for her. Ferrell is an eminently likable performer whose many characters, from Ricky Bobby to Ron Burgundy, have become part of our cultural lexicon. Anyone who’s likely to give Steele a hard time at a questionable watering hole probably wouldn’t want to try something in front of the star of Talladega Nights — a dynamic the pair acknowledge throughout their weeks-long trek from New York to Los Angeles.
What Steele learns, much like I did in 2017, is that transitioning does indeed change your relationship with wide swaths of the country. There are fewer places where she feels safe, and some where she feels actively threatened. Casual interactions with clerks, waiters, and fellow travelers become fraught highwire acts. Like me, Steele has privileges of race and financial security, but those are not impenetrable shields against the kinds of things that can happen to trans women in sparsely populated places. On the other hand, Steele does find surprising spaces of belonging, from a karaoke bar, to a hot air balloon ride, to a dirt track race in the middle of nowhere.
The impression some people on the coasts have of “middle America” or “Trump country” as a unilaterally bigoted area is a deeply misguided one. Not only do millions of LGBTQ+ people live in red states, their overall populations largely support the broad brushstrokes of equality, as polling shows. According to data collected by the Public Religion Research Institute, a majority of Americans in red states now support same-sex marriage rights and anti-discrimination protections for queer and trans people. Opposition exists, and it can be stark. But the strikingly cruel legislation being passed in conservative regions of the U.S. is not so much a product of the people who live there as it is fueled by an ongoing propaganda campaign; most Americans are just trying to live. In political parlance, the anti-LGBTQ+ movement is largely “astroturfed” — funded by powerful fundraising organizations that pre-write legislation and ram it through legislatures using politicians who have risen to power by catering to the diehard Republican voters who participate in state-level primaries. The reality is cynical: the GOP machine lost on same-sex marriage in 2015, so they’ve had to move on to trans people to keep the most extreme elements of their base frothing mad.
Photographer Carmen DeCristo has been selling *American Girl Doll* for gas money as she road trips across the country.
Outside of that calculated hatred, as Ferrell and Steele learn, the actual texture of the country is far more complicated. They do encounter some dicey situations. At a saloon-style steakhouse in Amarillo, they feel like they’re in a “fish bowl,” with transphobic cowards snapping photos of them to post on Facebook later alongside hateful comments. But Steele also learns that she perhaps underestimated how welcoming most Americans can be. We are, after all, a country that values many of the same things trans people do: freedom, self-expression, and chasing a dream.
At the dirt track race, Steele expresses some trepidation about being there given some of the horror stories she has seen “on the news.” She wants nothing more than to enjoy a favorite pastime, but she fears the masculine culture surrounding such events may no longer be a good fit for a visibly trans woman like herself. She says as much to a man in a ballcap and a camo hoodie — the kind of guy some might wave away with a stereotype — but instead the stranger reassures Steele, “Don’t be afraid. If you want to come out, come out.” Later, she tells Ferrell through tears, “I’m not really afraid of these people. I’m afraid of hating myself.”
And it’s Ferrell’s unvarnished responses throughout the production that really make Will & Harper shine. Ferrell, while undyingly supportive of his friend and longtime creative partner, was not previously familiar with trans people in his private life, going so far as to say he had “zero knowledge” of the community beforehand. It shows. As far as I can tell, he did not do some week-long intensive with GLAAD before climbing into a station wagon with Steele and hitting “record,” and that makes the film feel authentic and relatable. Ferrell asks Steele un-P.C. questions about her boobs. He tries to be an ally to her but at times falls short. He cries with her. He feels disappointment in himself. They hug, they laugh, and they do cannonballs together in a motel pool. Ferrell may be a celebrity, but he models what many Americans have gone through this past decade, figuring out how to accept a trans loved one with no guidebook. That process, much like the film that was made about it, is beautiful, messy, and perfectly imperfect.
Will & Harper is in limited theaters September 13 and streams on Netflix September 27.
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