Though many raunchy comedies before it have relied on gay panic jokes, Blockers gives us a moving story about a gay teen and her father’s quest to help her accept herself. (Warning: spoilers!)

Universal Pictures Miles Robbins as Connor, Geraldine Viswanathan as Kayla, Kathryn Newton as Julie, Graham Phillips as Austin, Gideon Adlon as Sam, and Jimmy Bellinger as Chad make up the teen cast of Blockers.

The basic concept of Blockers sounds like typical sex comedy fare with a parental twist. Directed by Pitch Perfect writer Kay Cannon, the film follows three parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena, and Ike Barinholtz) as they perform a series of high jinks to stop their three children (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Gideon Adlon) from going through with a pact to have sex for the first time on prom night. The film’s trailers have given a certain impression: This is a broad, sexed-up comedy centered on these three adults as they struggle with the fact that their daughters are sexual beings. That’s a movie that could go in one of two directions — a retrograde morality play hung up on concepts of virginity and purity, or a thoughtful meditation on parenting and the pressure society puts on girls. Luckily for us all, Blockers chooses the latter, with a lot of classic R-rated comedy raunch thrown in. Yes, this is a film in which Cena chugs beer through his asshole. But Blockers is not only concerned with the parents. The movie is just as centered on their daughters — three young women with very different perspectives and priorities, all committed to maintaining agency over their own lives, identities, and sexualities. And one of them — Sam, portrayed by Adlon — is going through something pretty intense. While her two friends are looking to have sex because, well, they feel like it, Sam enters into the pact out of fear that her bond with her best friends will fade away after high school if she doesn’t share this big experience with them. She’s not particularly interested in having sex with her date, a fedora-wearing but nice-seeming young man named Chad (Jimmy Bellinger). In fact, Sam is gay. When we first meet her she hasn’t figured out how to fully admit that to herself, let alone how to tell anyone else in her life. Her crush on a female classmate goes unspoken, and she funnels her energy into photoshopping herself into photos with Xena the Warrior Princess.

Universal Pictures Ike Barinholtz as Hunter, Adlon as Sam, and Bellinger as Chad in Blockers.

Her dad, though, already knows. Hunter, played by Barinholtz, figured it out through some strong parental instinct long before his daughter told anyone. It’s a driving force behind his role in the parental plot. The other two parents are consumed by a desire to preserve their virginal visions of their little girls and control over their daughters’ lives. Hunter, on the other hand, just worries that by sleeping with a man, Sam would be having an inauthentic experience. He wants to stop her from running away from who she really is. It’s a moving story that cuts through the obscenity that surrounds it. It might even leave you a little teary. All the evidence you need that queer representation is still scarce in major studio films lies in the fact that a movie like Love, Simon only came out this year. That film was released only a month before Blockers and was the first studio-made teen romantic comedy centered on a gay character. If that’s the ground we’re still breaking in 2018, then Sam’s storyline in Blockers marks a relatively rare occasion.

The genre has been far more likely to mock queerness than to actually portray a central lesbian character.

Historically, raunchy comedies in the vein of Baywatch, Get Hard, The Hangover, CHiPs, and so many more have returned again and again to gay panic jokes. Though the details shift, the basics stay the same: Characters are repulsed by the simple thought that someone else might think they’re queer. It’s played for laughs time and again, functioning as bait to the anti-gay (and anti-trans) sentiment ingrained in the audience. A same-sex flirt, a kiss, a shared bed, the existence of a penis near another character’s penis — these are treated as things to be avoided at all costs. The genre has been far more likely to mock queerness than to actually portray a central lesbian character, let alone one whose journey to self-acceptance is so tenderly rendered.

Universal Pictures Ramona Young as Angelica and Adlon as Sam in Blockers.