Because surely we all wish we could be with a Bel-Ami certified twunk like Danny, right? Well some of us do, sure, but of course plenty of other people are instead into what Ray is selling, or any of the other non-white or non-butch hustlers who populate Stonewall but get only a minimal, pat-on-the-head kind of attention. The movie could never even consider such a possibility, though. Here is a startlingly direct exercising of entitlement: “Yeah, I know in real life it happened to those people, but wouldn’t it be better if it happened to someone like this?”

Stonewall insists, with its hokey story about Danny’s personal growth and struggles with his family back home in Indiana, that what actually happened isn’t good enough. That no one will care unless there’s a beautiful young white man at the center of the story. Because who is more wonderful, compelling, appealing than that? Which may sadly be the opinion of certain corners of the market, but who cares about those people. They have plenty of movies made for them. Meanwhile, there are plenty other recent movies that aren’t catered to their narrow tastes but that have done just fine.

What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is. We have to literally see a black character hand Danny a brick so Danny can be the first to throw it and the first to cheer “Gay power!” (This is the moment my screening audience, of professional critics, was lost to groans and laughter for the rest of the movie.) We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”

Which, of course, is nonsense. When Straight Outta Compton is earning $60 million on its opening weekend, it’s nonsense. When Tangerine is earning rave reviews and art-house dollars, it’s nonsense. When a show like Transparent is winning Emmys, it’s nonsense. But Stonewall demands that we accept Emmerich’s evasive, self-serving sociology and then has the audacity to ask that we be moved by it. We’re not.

Aside from its offensiveness, Stonewall is, plain and simple, a terribly made movie, with an alarmingly clunky script by acclaimed playwright Jon Robin Baitz (“I’m too angry to love anyone right now” is one howler—of course delivered by Danny to poor, still pining Ray) and a production design that makes late 1960s Christopher Street look like Sesame Street. The story plunks along, until the riots rather unceremoniously, and confusingly, begin, and then the movie hobbles lamely to a close, giving us a resolution to the family-strife plot that’s the least interesting thing in the movie. Emmerich takes one of the most politically charged periods of the last century and turns it into a bland, facile coming-of-age story.

Throughout all this, Irvine looks good in the aforementioned T-shirt, but that’s about all he does. Beauchamp at least offers some glimmers of life, but Ray is so tragically, meanly written that there’s only so much that can be done to turn him into a human. Real-life Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson only gets a little screen time, and is played as comic relief, flatly, by Otoja Abit. Many of the characters who don’t look and sound like Danny are rendered as jokes, silly people who need Danny’s relatively rugged masculinity to get them angry and organized. Stonewall is ultimately yet another cartoonish fantasy about white saviors and square-jawed heroes; it should be called Independence Gay.

Maybe it’s asking too much to get a smart, accurate Stonewall movie. After all, a heck of a lot of straight history has been schmaltzified by Hollywood, neatly edited and tidied up, so why shouldn’t gay history get the same shitty treatment? But that this film was directed by a gay man, written by a gay man, with an obvious intent to educate, uplift, and inspire, in this particular political climate, and is still so maddeningly, stultifyingly bungled serves only to show us how ridiculous the concept of a monolithic “gay community” really is. Stonewall at least does that bit of good: it illustrates how systems of privilege and prejudice within a minority can be just as pervasive and ugly as anything imposed from the outside. And that’s an outrage. So how long until someone throws a brick through the screen?