The frenzied disco-ball-in-a-blender pitch of this film gave me a headache, and its bathetic milleu of heroic drag queens and tortured-but-brave gay guys goes totally against my grain, but Head On is a superior gay-oriented film that even holds its own with Walking On Water and lantana as one of the better films to come out of post-Priscilla Australian cinema.

Director Ana Kokkinos and co-writer Andrew Bovell (lantana, Strictly Ballroom) take the high-pitched road adapting Christos Tsiolkas' excellent novel "Loaded", which wasn't such a desperate tale of Ari finding love and his sexual identity, but was rather a low-drama/high-impact meditation on Gen-X ennui and those slowly-spinning/going-nowhere inner-urban cogs.

"Loaded" was the dark shadow to Timothy Conigrave's beautiful and devastating "Holding The Man", which came out around the same time and which was/is one of the only pieces of gay creativity that matter-of-factly celebrates the wonderment of true love and lifelong metaphysical commitment. "Loaded", on the other hand, was the total flipside, garbage-dump full of missed connections and seething lost souls, looking around for happiness everywhere but in the right place.

At its centre was Ari, fighting ambivalence and displacement on multiple fronts. His traditional Greek parents pull him one way, his druggy peers pull him the other, while the lure of heterosexuality goes head-to-head with Ari's attraction to boys. Getting a job and moving through life in an ever-upwards motion are pipe dreams here - Ari will get to them later, in his thirties, when it'll be too late anyway. What have you got to offer the corporate world when you're only trained in clubbing and futile self-exploration?

So there was a wonderful melancholy pessimism in "Loaded" that Kokkinos and Bovell have replaced with frustration and angst. Pessimism and angst are not the same things at all, and the difference is crucial, and it's what spoils the film. In Head On, Ari and his peers seem to know there's a way around their problems - they just can't find it, and they're getting the serious shits from all the false starts.

When Ari crumbles naked to the floor in the corridor near film's end whimpering that he's sorry, and wants a second chance, Tsiolkas' original character is ruptured and destroyed - we knew Ari was going backwards, but he didn't. By investing him with this knowledge the film makes him look like a bit of a tosser - a spoilt brat with no objective in life but to whinge and show everyone how tough/tender/hard-done-by he is. The Ari of Head On is an indulgent, slightly boring wastrel, a gorgeous and intelligent guy who has the time of his life with sex and drugs and trouble with the cops, but who also wants to be able to defer responsibility and apportion blame, and generally complain and tell people his life is terrible.

I don't think that's what Tsiolkas intended. I always saw Ari as a cypher everyman - the embodiment of nothingness, the love and hope and niceness floating around inside him unnoticed by everyone including him. That was the whole point, for me, and it's missing from Head On, which is ok compared to most gay films, but too sentimentalised and forgiving to do the haunting original material justice.

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