Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is a 25-year-old aspiring novelist, living in London and paying his dues working at a literary magazine. Frustrated by his own ambitions and the pressures to succeed, Max begins moonlighting as a sex worker with the pseudonym Sebastian, secretly meeting men via an escorting platform and using his experiences to fuel his stories. What begins as a few furtive meetings soon becomes a hidden nocturnal life, and the debut novel that he has been longing to write finally seems within reach.

An idea that I’ve always found interesting in cinema is the lengths an artist will go to create their work. “Sebastian,” the new film written and directed by Mikko Mäkelä and starring Ruaridh Mollica, explores this idea through Max (Mollica), a somewhat unhappy 25 year old freelance writer who is hungry for more, specifically a debut novel that he has already begun to piece together about a sex worker named Sebastian. Max, telling no one, secretly becomes Sebastian, living the life of his lead character and writing the novel through his experiences.

The film opens with Max (as Sebastian) and Peter (David Nellist), who we assume is his Max’s first client. After having sex with the older man, Max is distressed, leaving the apartment and spitting on the street. We aren’t sure in that moment if Max is disgusted by the man, the fact that he just sold himself or something else altogether. When Max counts the money; however, something lights up in side of him, something in addition to what he needs for his novel.

Despite Max’s belief that he needs more than he is getting at his day job at Wall Magazine, there are bright lights in the darkness. He has a very supportive friend in Amna (a great Hiftu Quasem), his latest pieces are doing very well for the magazine, and he is on deck to interview Bret Easton Ellis, who at 21 years old, already had what Max desperately desires - his first published book. In addition to the interview, he is workshopping bits of the novel in a writing class and working with a publisher who, despite some initial misgivings about another queer novel about sex work, believes Max might have something new to say.

As the film progresses, Mäkelä and Mollica walk a very tight line between Max’s need to create a meaningful work with his debut novel and the fact that he is also struggling with the complicated truth of what it means to be a sex worker, the good and the bad. The film, via a lens of sex positivity, presents interesting questions about sex and sex work, and wisely does so without an attached judgement. The film and Mäkelä also never exploit the age of the men Max is having sex with, instead allowing for well defined characters played by fantastic actors.

Things become even more complex when Max meets and returns to a client, Nicholas (a wonderful Jonathan Hyde), a relationship that changes the course of the novel. As Max continues sex working and writing, the edge where Sebastian and Max meet is becoming even more blurred, leaving Max and the audience with more questions. Is Max attempting to fill a void in his life with sex? Is he perhaps falling in love with one of his clients? Is he creating a fabrication in life in order to strengthen the fiction of his book, or vise/versa?

Attempting to balance the allure of being wanted with the shame he sometimes feels after sex, alongside his developing desire for his classmate and feelings for Nicholas, Max’s worlds begin to collapse into each other, risking his job, the interview with Ellis, his novel, and the loose grip he has on keeping Sebastian separated from Max.

“Sebastian” is a naturalistic and riveting journey, anchored by Mollica’s openness, expressed through Max and delicately guided by Mäkeläs direction and observed by Cinematographer Iikka Salminen’s lens. The film is an observation of truth - of what it means to be a writer, a sexual being, and an imperfect young gay man trying to figure out his dreams and how far he will go to achieve them.

“Sebastian” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and is currently showing in theaters in select cities now! More info here: https://kinolorber.com/film/sebastian