Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer The Sundance Film Festival prides itself on being a place of innovation and discovery, and this year’s 40th anniversary celebration has an entry that could well check both boxes – “Ponyboi,” a genre-blending road movie featuring writer and star River Gallo.
Gallo plays the titular Ponyboi, an intersex sex worker hustling to survive in New Jersey. His days are spent with pregnant best friend Angel (Victoria Pedretti) working a strip mall laundromat; his nights with his secret lover and aspiring pimp, Angel’s baby’s father Vinnie (Dylan O’Brien).
As it often happens on the turnpike, things go south when some tainted crystal meth and a dead mafioso spin Ponyboi’s fragile world into chaos, forcing him to confront his demons.
Gallo is writer and star on the project. A pedigreed artist who came up through USC and the Sundance labs, they are intersex and identify as non-binary and trans fem using they/them pronouns.
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