The cowboy has been a mainstay in American culture for centuries, from the myths that defined the “go west” mentality to the brand of masculinity defined by actors like John Wayne. In one of the most famous deconstructions of this figure and its legacy, The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano asks “whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type.” So, it makes perfect sense for a film like Cowboys to exist, and to queer the concepts of masculinity, the cowboy, and what it means to be man.

Cowboys is the kind of trans story that feels rare in mainstream cinema — the actual “coming out” is a single scene and not the dominant force of the narrative, and the internal anguish of a trans character isn’t the single emotional note of the film. Instead, Cowboys is about a journey to the Canadian border, shared by father and son — Troy (Steve Zahn) and Joe (Sasha Knight), respectively — somewhere between a desire to become cowboys and to run away from a home environment where the boy doesn’t feel comfortable or safe. The backstory of Joe’s coming out, and the fractured relationship between his parents, is explored in a few flashbacks that reinforce certain moments in the narrative. These integrated scenes are effective from a thematic point of view, and allow for an effective slow burn of character development and motivation (the moment where Joe decides to run away from home is particularly powerful). However, they also cause the timeline to feel a little muddled, which, for a film focused on the narrative propulsion of a journey, can sometimes make it feel more like a slog.

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Joe’s backstory allows Cowboys to explore the difficulty of being young and trans, but never in a way that feels exploitative. For example, the boy has a deteriorating relationship with his mother, Sally (Jillian Bell), who continually misgenders him, and is (potentially willfully) ignorant of his gender (“sometime she dresses up like a tomboy, but I don’t let her go out like this”). This relationship, and the facade that Sally tries to put up with it, is another way into Cowboys most interesting theme: the limitations that come with certain kinds of Americana and myth-making. The landscape that opens the film is described as being “so pretty it’s almost too much,” and this perfection — in landscape, in relationships, the importance of things looking pretty and just right — echoes through from the world around the characters to their relationships with one another. The thing that seems to make Joe’s  identity impossible for Sally to accept is the way in which it goes against what she wants and expects; to begin with, she assumes Joe is just a tomboy, that nobody would be a girl by choice, that Joe feels this way because of the stories that he’s told by Troy. These decisions have a profound echo when Joe comes out as trans to Troy, saying “I think aliens put me in this girl body as a joke.” There’s power and affirmation in Joe’s certainty, and in refuting the idea of being confused: “I’ve known my entire life. I’m sorry.”

These limitations associated with gender — and the ways in which the characters push their expectations of gender onto one another — is also something that Cowboys explores through its relationship with maleness and the archetype of the cowboy. When Troy says “we’re outlaws, son” to Joe, it’s at once a moment of bonding and something that illustrates the problems with having an understanding of maleness and masculinity that’s so limited. The iconography of the cowboy is everywhere — wild horses, rifles and the journey itself — and the power of Cowboys is the way in which it’s able to illustrate why these images and ideas are so important to Joe, while still showing that the cowboy alone is not enough to make a man.

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The most important observation that Cowboys makes about its eponymous figures is that they don’t really exist anymore — not in the way they do in Joe’s imagination, or the stories that he shares with Troy. There are moments where the myth of the cowboy collides with reality, often with tragic consequences. Cowboys manages to avoid making its story too morally simplistic; in spite of the problems that Joe has at home, there’s no clear good-evil dichotomy that can simplify things for him. As much as Joe might want them, there are no white hats and black hats to divide the world into. The lone good cop in Joe’s small town is the closest that Cowboys comes to having a classic white hat, but the institution and officers around her undermine that, evidenced by an early moment in the film where Troy talks about the difference between knowing how to use a gun and knowing how to pull the trigger.

Cowboys’ messy exploration of relationships is one of its greatest strengths. The film makes it clear that the work to be done in understanding trans and queer children should come from the parents; it doesn’t use Joe’s journey as a way to turn his parents into better people, but instead uses it to illustrate the fractures in their relationships, and the problems that his parents have with expecting him to be a certain way. The problem is that some of these issues are in danger of being swept under the rug; Cowboys is powerful when it explores the limits of conventions — of gender, of small towns, of family — and the moments where neatness and clarity come to the forefront are the ones that show a little uncertainty in terms of the best ways for the film to move forward. Cowboys understands that the world isn’t a simple place, and that you can’t just ride off into the sunset.

Sam Moore (@Sam_Moore1994) is a writer, artist and editor. Their writing on the intersections of culture, queerness and politics has been published by The Los Angeles Review of Books, i-D, Little White Lies and other places both in print and online.