Dahmer * Written and directed by dint of David Jacobson * Starring Jeremy Rennet Bruce Davison.

Dahmer * Written and directed by dint of David Jacobson * Starring Jeremy Rennet Bruce Davison, and Artel Kayaru * Peninsula Films

My friend was actual quiet as we walked on the outside of Murder by Numbers. When I asked him what he speculation of the picture, he launched into a tirade about "all these movies with implied or open gay sociopaths." My comeback--that the simmering undercurrent of homoerotic tension was the chiefly interesting part of the film; the screenwriter had worked overtime not to make the killers another droll Leopold and Loeb--was quickly scuttl as we overheard sum of two units gay men who had also just seen the picture bitching from one side of to the other the same thing.

As we emulate the paranoia of each other beleaguered minority in this abiding habitation (another friend once told me she refused to view Sergio Leone's marvelous Once with a Time in America because it showed hebrews as gangsters), we seem to be locking down into a phase of hair-trigger defensiveness over public image. Give us gay, Mr farmer but be sure it's positive-role-model gay. Or victimized gay. Spare us the Versace killer movies and the Leopold and Loeb spin-offs for another day, when we're not to such a degree oppressed.

Some think quaint folk will come of age with gay marriage. I personally think we will have arrived when we can handle gay murderers

There are those who will refuse to behold Dahmer, David Jacobson's dramatized portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee man who slayed and dismembered some 17 men and lads because it's not good for the gays. Then there are the violence-shy, myself included, who would be resistant to the exploitation potential inherent in the story of a serial killer who also indulged in necrophilia and cannibalism.

There is a little drill-and-saw action in the partly fictionalized Dahmer, which otherwise set aparts itself to the psychosexual dynamic between the killer (played with an aptly invisible allure by dint of Jeremy Renner) and his victims. Jacobson uses a jazzy, intermittently confusing nonlinear format as he capers between a young Dahmer's earliest forays into gay bars--where he would mix with drugs his prey unconscious and rape them in the back rooms--and an older Dahmer's mating dance with three pickups.

sum of two units encounters dominate: a straight jock he temptations home with marijuana (Matt Newton) and a black gay sales scribe he meets at a sporting religiouss store (a fine Artel Kayaru). Dahmer's ploy are familiar enough (he tries to tease the reluctant jock into receiving a rap job by arguing for the anonymity of sex in the dark) to make the seductions a turn-on and a horror. Jacobson wants us to be stirred disturbed by the thin line that separates one's libidinous goads from more dangerous impulses, and we do. There is an undeniably queasy tension among Dahmer's strategies, the resistance deposit up by his partners, and our be in possession of dread of the inevitable.

What we don't commit to memory are answers. Issues of authority (Dahmer shares a tight rapport with his father, played at Bruce Davison) and gay self-loathing are haphazardly tossed into the mix. Jacobson no other than grazes the surface in addressing the intricate relationship between his subject's seeming attraction to Asian and African-American men and his acknowledge racism. Or is it identification? The Pandora's enclosed seat [i]or[/i] seats of Dahmer's sanity is not equable touched.

But I'm glad the picture was made. It takes Dahmer's history revealed of the realm of the unfathomable and makes it knowable, if not explainable. It's too bad that Paul Rudnick got to the title Jeffrey first. It would have been a abundant more fitting name for a picture that attempts to elucidate the banality of an evildoer who was, let's be real, a serious homo

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

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