Drive Back Home

Drive Back Home 💖, dir. Michael Clowater, 2024, Canada, 100 min.
Thursday, June 26, 2025, 5:30 pm, Herbst Theatre
⚠️ content advisory: homophobic violence

Drive Back Home

We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of Canada, and particularly big cities like Toronto and Montréal, as an LGBTQ paradise, with marriage equality and all the trimmings, but it hasn’t always been that way. In 1970, the police still rounded up the queers, with serious prison time for any who couldn’t wriggle out of it.

Drive Back Home starts with the small-town New Brunswick funeral of the family patriarch, Perley, senior, a nasty piece of work no one wants to admit that no one liked. A few days later, they get a call from the Toronto police.

Perley, junior (Alan Cumming, pictured left) was arrested for cruising in a Toronto park, so his brother Wid (Charlie Creed-Miles, right) had to drive 800 miles (1300 km, but in 1970, it was still miles and Imperial gallons in Canada) from Stanley, New Brunswick (a small town north of Fredericton), in a borrowed truck to spring him. Wid wants to bail Perley out and then leave him in Toronto, but his mother insists that Wid bring him home.

The brothers have an uneasy relationship, both too proud to admit they need one another. They have multiple misadventures along the way, as you might guess from the photo, but in the process they confront some of the skeletons in the family closet, as well as homophobia from the locals along the way, and their own past.

There are certainly some funny moments, enough to keep the story from getting bogged down, but Drive Back Home is much more a drama than a comedy. The heartfelt performances by Alan Cumming, Charlie Creed-Miles, and the supporting cast, breathe life into a complicated story about an era that seems ancient despite being well within living memory. I’d go see Alan Cumming in almost anything, but Drive Back Home is a must see on its own merits.

• IMDb • trailer • semi-official website • Instagram/‌Facebook: @TheDriveBackHome • Film Freeway • Wikipedia •