The Leopold and Loeb court case of 1924 was filled to the brim with scandalous revelations about “perverts” and a Freudian defence based on the homo-psychosis of the defendants, who were two handsome Chicago high-society princes/unremorseful gay-lover killers.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had killed a young local boy for a lark and put his body in a drain pipe. Living louche before the murder, entertaining drag queens around the poker table, Leopold and Loeb settled comfortably into prison life, running the prison library and eating most meals together for around four years, when Loeb was slashed to death in the showers by a fellow inmate.

Early media savvy superstars, Leopold and Loeb were the inspiration for the Hitchcock movie Rope and in 1959 when the Orson Welles' Compulsion used the tag line “Based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case” Leopold successfly sued 20th Century Fox.

Released in 1971, Leopold moved to Puerto Rico, where he married and continued his lifelong study of ornithology. Leopold was reported to have had an IQ of 200, and he spoke 28 languages fluently.

In other words, we could go on for ages about the real Leopold and Loeb, intriguing gay figures with flair and an all-for-love court-and-prison drama to rival Oscar Wilde. Discussions about "New Queer Cinema", and Swoon in particular, on the other hand, run dry very quickly. The contrast between real gay outlaws and faux, red-ribbon ones is a sharp one, and it shows the shortcomings of late AIDS-era American gay culture in a most unforgiving light.

The epitome of “New Queer Cinema”, Swoon is a wilted, limp film that bypasses the glamourous velocity of its subject matter in favour of lame film-school callisthenics. Pretentious experiments with form and style, an incompetent approach to storytelling and a decidedly emasculated view of homosexual killers/lovers make the movie a disappointing bore.

Despite the braggadocio of the film’s tagline (“puts the homo back into homicide”) and its overweening attempt to be “queer”, its detachment from the sweltering passion of its main characters, their haughty arrogance, their lethality, renders this queer film free of any sexuality.

Like a Herb Ritts coffee-table book, there’s plenty of arty-farty glances at highly sexual subjects, but no real sense of sex. Leopold once said that he was jealous of the food Loeb ate and the water Loeb drank, as they became a part of his being. All evidence suggests that he helped shove their victim’s warm corpse into a sewer pipe because that’s what Loeb wanted him to do. There’s absolutely no indication of this passion, this primeval love in the film. Instead, there’s crazy camera angles, contrived dialogue, and ham acting. To show audiences that violence and homosexuality are timeless concerns, Kalin places remote controls and cell phones in the occasional shot. A female, black court stenographer adds “kookiness” to the odd scene, but, as Kalin noted, such a figure would never have appeared in a courtroom of 1924.

Why take one of the most inherently sensational stories of the century – possibly the single most sensational story of the gay century – and then play stupid games with it, as though the story itself is of no consequence? Putting material like this in the background is just a lazy way of getting around thinking up your own plot.