You’re heading home early one morning after a night of partying and you find a sexy young man comatose in a gutter.  What do you do?

This is the opening dilemma in the latest feature from the prolific New York filmmaker Todd Verow, Bad Boy Street.  Shifting from his NYC homebase to the city of light, Paris, Verow crafts a character-driven story punctuated by shadows and secrets.

Claude (Yann deMonterno) is the handsome older gent who happens upon the aforementioned young man in the gutter.  His good Samaritan instinct kicks in straightaway and when he can find no ID, decides to take him home to his apartment to safely sleep off the night’s intoxication. He sleeps on the couch and lets the young man have his bed, only to awake the next morning to find his guest naked and going down on him.

It’s the beginning of an unconventional relationship between 40-something Claude and the 20-something American, who reveals his name only as Brad. With that unconventional first date, the two – despite their age difference, nationalities and Brad’s personal demons – tenuously begin to get to know one another and possibly find love.

This is director Verow’s 35th feature film. His catalogue spans the confronting journey of sex addiction in Anonymous (2004), the selective guessing-game relationship chronicle of Deleted Scenes (2010) and the autobiographical art student/rent boy drama Between Something And Nothing (2008).

Sexy, visual and never boring, Verow’s style was born out of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, which unapologetically displayed the lives of GLBT characters on screen in explicit, unflinching detail; an antidote to the stereotyping of GLBT people in Hollywood films. A must-see for fans of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, Bad Boy Street is an accomplished, serious gay romance featuring an especially touching performance by deMonterno as a man whose stable life is upended.

Bad Boy Street screens at Rialto Cinemas Newmarket at 6:30pm, Thursday 19 July.  Tickets available to book at www.number8films.com.