We meet Shy and Valentine (Silas Howard and Harry Dodge), the trans-male leads of By Hook or By Crook (2001), at a low, though the film doesn’t suggest their lives had many highs to start with. Hoxie, Kansas-based, bills-burning service worker Shy is skipping town after receiving a notice from the bank that his house is being repossessed and that he has fewer than 48 hours to vacate. Aimless Valentine, who lives with a woman named Billie (Stanya Kahn, who also co-wrote the film), is being beaten up by a bigot in an alleyway. The pair cross paths for the first time during the latter incident, during which Shy, who’s hitchhiked from Kansas to San Francisco to start fresh, comes to the inadvertent rescue. 

An immediately close friendship is struck. So is a mutually made decision that in a life where finding acceptance is hard and securing well-paying work is harder, it might be worth it to reinvent themselves as petty criminals. Guns are bought. Mean mugs are practiced in bathroom mirrors while Valentine reminisces about his leading tough-guy bonafide: poking a woman’s eye out with a pen while at a psychiatric hospital he was forced into as a kid for wearing boy’s clothes. 

By Hook or By Crook, which Howard and Dodge also directed and scribed on a wing and a prayer, doesn’t become a crime thriller, as that last narrative development might suggest. It’s a bittersweet drama that vividly evokes the crush of poverty and the pain of an existence where there appears no obvious path to wriggle out from under it, not least because the identity that feels the rightest automatically presents occupational disadvantages in a society that prizes conformity in front-facing roles. 

Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn, and Silas Howard in By Hook or By Crook.

By Hook or By Crook isn’t miserablist, pessimistic for the sake of it. It presents these lives as they are, its sense of vérité bolstered by its handheld, mini-DV camerawork. Putting a life-affirming friendship at its front gives it a through line of hopefulness. That isn’t because you suspect Howard, Dodge, and Kahn have a satisfying happy ending in store, but because they persuasively inject the movie with the universal feeling one gets after spending time with a close friend amid a dark period — the feeling that whatever setbacks life throws, friendship can make them survivable. You’re glad that Shy, who says early in the film that he’s avoided getting too close to anyone out of a fear that they’ll die (a residual trauma of his accepting father’s recent death), makes an exception. 

Despite its low budget and the sometimes-amateurishness of its performances, it isn’t obvious that By Hook or By Crook was made by people who came into filmmaking practically on a whim. Inspired by Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) and the recent uptick in successful independent films, Dodge and Howard, who’d been running a café, decided to write the movie, an extension of years understanding that, as gender-nonconforming people, “if you didn’t see something reflecting you, you needed to make it happen,” Howard said in an interview with Filmmaker magazine. “You couldn’t wait for permission, because nobody gave a shit.” 

After By Hook or By Crook’s premiere, the inchoate filmmakers continued forward with what personally felt right rather than what directors who’ve made a well-received first feature might. Howard abstained from making anything else until he could sharpen his behind-the-camera savvy at UCLA’s film school. Dodge forewent filmmaking altogether for a career in multimedia art. Their unconventional next steps feel well-suited to a movie that finds value, for better and for worse, in following one’s instincts.