The Delta

A treasure of the 1990s’ New Queer Cinema, Ira Sachs’s incisive debut feature moodily evokes the wide space between dreams, desires, and fulfillment in post–Vietnam War America via the romance between Lincoln, an affluent white teenager, and Minh, the immigrant son of a poor Vietnamese woman and a Black GI. The vivid setting is a little-seen, little-known Memphis, a city where kids get through their nights by drinking and doing drugs and gay men struggle with questions of personal identity and fulfillment. When Lincoln and Minh set off on a boat down the Mississippi, could it just be another in a long series of failed escapes?