The Greatest (2024) – Queer Love, Fear and Lost Time
The Greatest (2024): When Fear Destroys Love And Families
The Greatest (2024): Fear, Marriage And The Man Jay Never Got To Be
The Greatest is one of those films that doesn’t start with a tragedy, but with something much more dangerous – an ordinary life that looks “perfect” from the outside.
We are in 1960s New York. Jay is a handsome young man with the usual checklist in front of him: job in his father’s company, a nice wife, a house, a child, Sunday dinners, suits, smiles, and a future that everyone around him understands. Beverly is that “right kind of girl” – the one you marry, not the one you leave. The plan is simple: get married, have a family, be normal. End of story.
Except it isn’t.
Jay, Beverly and the life that is supposed to be enough
In the beginning, The Greatest plays like a straight 60s drama. Friends tease Jay about sex, Beverly’s friends gossip about him, everyone talks about marriage, “laying the pipe”, babies and respectability. The camera looks soft, the colors are gentle, the atmosphere almost nostalgic. If you didn’t know what film you were watching, you’d think this is another retro romance about young people growing up and settling down.
Beverly really loves him. She is not a monster, not an idiot, not a caricature. She is a woman who has been told her whole life that a husband and a child will be enough, and she is trying very hard to believe it. Their relationship feels honest, but slightly off – like a picture that hangs a little crooked on the wall and nobody mentions it out loud.
Enter Ricky – the “wrong” man at exactly the right time
Then Jay meets Ricky.
Ricky is a Puerto Rican barman, a working-class guy who moves through the world with a mixture of shyness and quiet confidence. He listens. He really listens. Their first conversations are full of small things – work, family, music – but under the surface it is obvious: Jay relaxes around him in a way he never does around Beverly or his family.
They see each other again at a fancy event where Ricky is serving drinks and Jay is one of the “important” people in a suit. Jay pulls him outside for a cigarette, and the hierarchy disappears for a moment. It is just two young men standing too close, talking too softly, looking at each other for a little too long. The whole film turns in that tiny space between them.
From there, their connection grows the way so many queer stories did in the 60s – late night walks, hidden corners, underground bars, careful touches, too many “are you sure nobody can see us?” and that dangerous feeling that you are more alive in this one forbidden hour than in the rest of your week combined.
Fear as the third person in every scene
One of the things I love about The Greatest is that it never pretends this is just a love triangle. There is Jay, there is Beverly, there is Ricky – but there is also fear, sitting at the table with them at every moment.
Fear of the police raids. Fear of being seen in the wrong bar. Fear of his father. Fear of neighbors. Fear of losing the job, the family, the “respectable” life. In the 60s in America, being gay was not just “socially unacceptable” – it was officially considered abnormal, sick, perverted, something to be fixed or punished. And you feel that in Jay’s body language all the time.
Ricky is braver. He knows the risk, but he has less to lose in terms of social status and much more to lose if he keeps pretending. He pushes Jay gently toward honesty: live your own life, not the life your father wrote for you. There is a beautiful moment where Ricky says, in his own way, that one day Jay will be on his deathbed and will have to decide what mattered more – fancy things or having lived authentically.
Jay hears him. Jay even believes him. But belief is one thing. Courage is something else.
The breaking point when fear wins
The film never gives us a big melodramatic courtroom scene or a loud public outing. Instead, it shows what actually killed a lot of queer love stories in that era: one night, one raid, one choice made in panic.
There is an underground bar, there is tension in the air, and there is the constant question “Is it safe?” This is the kind of place police loved to hit – names taken, lives ruined. We don’t even have to see every detail. It’s enough to feel the chaos and then see the fallout.
Years later, when Jay and Ricky are older men, Ricky says quietly: “You know I did come back for you.” Jay answers: “I know you did.”
Those two lines tell you the entire story. Ricky went back for him. Jay didn’t show up. Maybe there were sirens, maybe there was a raid, maybe just the threat of one. Whatever happened that night, Jay chose survival inside the system over love outside of it. He ran home, back to Beverly, back to his father’s world, back into the closet with both hands.
That’s where “treatment” comes in. Beverly feels something is wrong, she is scared, humiliated, confused. She reaches for the tools her world gave her – doctors, pills, ideas of fixing what is “broken” in her husband. We see medication, emotional numbness, conversations about what is wrong with him and how to make him “better”.
It is quiet, polite violence. The kind that never makes headlines, but leaves scars for a lifetime.
Two half-lived lives and the dance they were owed
When we return to older Jay, he is surrounded by all the things he was supposed to want – house, family, respect – and yet he moves like a man who has spent decades breathing half-air. Beverly is worn down too, carrying her own disappointments. Their marriage is not a joke. It is a tragedy built out of silence.
Then comes the letter from his mother, and later the meeting with Ricky as an old man. Geoff Burt and David Arturo Sanchez carry all those missing years in their faces and bodies. There is no big scene of blame. No shouting. Just two people who know exactly what they lost and exactly why.
They talk. They admit what happened. Ricky says he did come back for him. Jay finally owns the fact that he knows. And then he asks a small, beautiful question: “Do you like to dance, Ricky?” Ricky answers that it is time they finally get that dance.
Near the very end, after they both admit how much time has been wasted, Jay says: “We’re here now, aren’t we? Let’s enjoy the time we have when I give my heart.”
For a film that could have ended in pure tragedy, this is a surprisingly gentle mercy. They don’t get back the lost decades. But they do get something real at the end, a bit of truth, a bit of peace, and a dance that should have happened long ago.
Why this story hits so close to home
If you grew up in a country where being gay wasn’t exactly illegal, but was absolutely unacceptable to talk about, this film is going to sting. There may not have been police raids on bars, but there were kitchen-table raids on people’s lives – “What will the neighbors say?”, “Don’t embarrass the family”, “Just marry, it will pass.”
I have seen men marry because of fear. I have seen women who felt something was wrong but didn’t have the language for it. I have seen families built on silence, where everyone suffers and nobody is really guilty, except the world around them. That is exactly the energy of The Greatest.
What the film understands, and what makes it powerful, is that Beverly is not the enemy. Ricky is not the enemy. Jay is not even his own enemy. The real villain is fear – fear supported by law, by religion, by medicine, by gossip, by the simple cruelty of “normality”.
The Greatest doesn’t scream this at you. It just lets you live with these people long enough that you feel the weight of every compromise, every moment when someone swallowed their truth to keep the peace. So when those older men finally stand up, shoulders back and chin up, and allow themselves that one dance, it feels like a small victory for every story that didn’t get this kind of ending.
It is not just a film about a gay love story in the 60s. It is a film about what fear does to love – and about how, if we are very lucky, courage sometimes arrives before it is completely too late.
