Love, Simon does the one thing a studio movie about a closeted teenager had never really been allowed to do before 2018: it treats the coming-out story as a romance, not a tragedy. Greg Berlanti directs from a screenplay by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, working off Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. The film runs 110 minutes and lands, for the most part, exactly where it aims.
The film premiered at the Mardi Gras Film Festival on February 27, 2018, and 20th Century Fox released it in the United States on March 16, 2018. It is the first film from a major studio built around a gay teenage romance. That fact is worth stating plainly, because it shapes what the movie can and cannot risk.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Simon Spier and the Emails to Blue
Nick Robinson plays Simon, a closeted gay teenager in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. He has a close, loving family — parents Emily and Jack, played by Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel, and a younger sister, Nora, played by Talitha Eliana Bateman. He has three best friends: Nick and Leah, both known since kindergarten, and Abby, a newcomer. Jorge Lendeborg Jr. plays Nick, Katherine Langford plays Leah, and Alexandra Shipp plays Abby.
Leah tells Simon about an anonymous online confession from a closeted classmate at their school who goes by the pseudonym “Blue.” Simon starts writing to Blue under his own pseudonym, “Jacques.” The two trade personal details by email and build something real. This correspondence is the spine of the film, and Berlanti is smart enough to let it carry weight without showing us Blue’s face.
Then a classmate named Martin, played by Logan Miller, finds the emails by accident. Martin is infatuated with Abby. He threatens to make Simon’s emails public unless Simon helps him win her over. Simon spends the rest of the movie trying to work out which of his classmates is Blue, while the blackmail sits on his back.
Bram, Lyle, and the Wrong Guesses
Simon’s search produces a run of false leads, and the film’s middle stretch lives or dies on how well those leads play. At a Halloween party he suspects Bram, played by Keiynan Lonsdale, and tries to connect with him — then walks in on Bram making out with a girl. Later, after Abby and Martin agree to practice lines for a school musical at a Waffle House, Simon bonds with their server, a classmate named Lyle, and decides Lyle might be Blue. At a school football game he runs into Lyle again, but before he can ask, he learns Lyle is interested in Abby.
Meanwhile the friendships take damage. Nick tells Simon he has feelings for Abby. Simon lies to him, saying Abby has a boyfriend in college. Leah walks an inebriated Simon home and talks vaguely about being fated to love one person very intensely; Simon assumes she means Nick. Simon comes out to Abby and is relieved when she takes it well.
A Cast That Carries the Load
Robinson has to hold the screen through long stretches where Simon is lying to almost everyone he loves, and he does it without begging for sympathy. That restraint matters. The film’s warmth comes from the ensemble around him, not from any single showy turn.
Garner and Duhamel get the parents’ material, and the movie gives them room to be people rather than obstacles. Langford’s Leah carries the film’s quietest hurt. Lonsdale, Lendeborg, and Shipp fill out a friend group that feels lived-in. Tony Hale shows up as Mr. Worth, and Natasha Rothwell plays Ms. Albright. Miles Heizer plays Cal.
The cast is the reason the tagline — “Everyone deserves a great love story” — doesn’t curdle into a slogan.
Where Love, Simon Sits Against the Teen Canon
The comparisons to John Hughes are the obvious ones, and they’re fair in temperament if not in craft. Love, Simon wants the same thing Hughes’s teen films wanted: to take adolescent feeling seriously without mocking it. What it adds is a protagonist Hughes never wrote.
| Love, Simon (2018) | The Hughes teen template | |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Greg Berlanti | John Hughes |
| Source | Becky Albertalli’s 2015 novel | Original screenplays |
| Studio | 20th Century Fox | Paramount / Universal |
| Central romance | Gay teenage boy, closeted | Straight teenage couples |
| Genre | Comedy, Drama, Romance | Comedy, Drama, Romance |
The runtime is one difference. At 110 minutes, Love, Simon runs longer than the Hughes pictures it gets compared to, and the extra time goes to the blackmail plot and the email thread. That’s mostly a good trade. Occasionally it isn’t.
The Blackmail Plot Is the Weak Link
Martin’s threat is the engine that keeps Simon from simply telling the truth, and it works as structure. It works less well as drama. The film never quite decides how seriously to take Martin, and so neither do we. He’s a comic nuisance who occasionally becomes a genuine threat, and the tonal shift never fully settles.
The bigger issue is that the movie’s best material — the emails — is the material it can’t show us directly. Simon and Blue’s connection has to be built almost entirely through voiceover and reaction, and while that’s handled with care, it means the central romance is the least visible thing on screen. The film is about a love story it keeps at arm’s length until the final act.
That’s a real limitation, and it’s the main reason Love, Simon lands short of the classic status some critics handed it. It’s not a flaw of execution so much as a constraint of the premise.
What the Box Office Says
Love, Simon grossed $66.7 million worldwide against a production budget of $10–17 million. At the domestic box office since 1980, it became the 15th-highest-grossing teen film and the 3rd-highest-grossing teen film by 20th Century Fox.
Those numbers matter more than they look. A modestly budgeted studio film about a gay teenager turned a profit, and that is the fact the industry actually responded to. The critical reception — praise for its “big heart, diverse and talented cast, and revolutionary normalcy,” descriptions of it as “funny, warm-hearted and life-affirming,” “tender, sweet, and affecting,” and a “hugely charming crowd-pleaser” — gave it cover, but the gross gave it a case.
The Numbers Behind Love, Simon
- Score: 7.2/10
- Release date (US): March 16, 2018
- Premiere: Mardi Gras Film Festival, February 27, 2018
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Studio: 20th Century Fox
- Budget: $10–17 million
- Worldwide gross: $66.7 million
- Director: Greg Berlanti
- Screenplay: Elizabeth Berger, Isaac Aptaker
- Based on: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli (2015)
- Metacritic: 72/100
The Verdict on Love, Simon
The phrase that got attached to Love, Simon most often was “revolutionary normalcy,” and it’s the right phrase for the right reason. The film’s politics are not in speeches. They’re in the fact that Simon’s parents are loving, his friends are ordinary, his suburb is ordinary, and his problem is not that he’s gay but that he hasn’t said so yet.
That’s a quieter achievement than it sounds, and it’s the part of Love, Simon that will last. The blackmail subplot will date. The Hughes comparisons will fade. What holds up is Robinson’s performance and the film’s refusal to punish its protagonist for wanting what everyone else in the genre gets to want.
It’s not a perfect movie. The middle sags, Martin never coheres, and the romance at the center stays just out of reach for too long. But Love, Simon does something the teen canon had been avoiding for decades, and it does it with warmth instead of self-congratulation.
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