When it was released in October 1999, “Boys Don’t Cry” was the first mainstream film to focus on a transgender man. Twenty years later, it’s still the rare feature to cent er on such a life . But as the culture has evolved, the film has proved to be very much of its time, with a contradictory legacy that trans viewers have grappled with.

The movie was based on the tragic true story of Brandon Teena, a 21-year-old Nebraska trans man who was raped and murdered in 1993. His death was the subject of salacious headlines, and it galvanized a small group of trans people to witness the trial and claim him as one of their own.

The director Kimberly Peirce , then a graduate student at Columbia University, was there, too, traveling with the Transexual Menace activist group as research for the film about Teena she was desperate to make. A self-described butch who, she told me, was questioning her identity at the time, she felt an instant connection with Teena.

“I loved that Brandon shaped himself into his fantasy of himself as a boy and lived as a man and loved women,” Peirce said, “so I always understood that about him — the courage, the audacity, the invention, the humor, the naïveté to live so authentically and boldly as he wanted.”