I will begin my review of Ryan Murphy’s latest film, The Prom, with an announcement to my LGBTQ+ community: we have arrived at equality! Like everyone else, we are now being exploited for commercial gain. Netflix’s two-hour-plus assault of product placement is a rushed, wannabe classic sending all kinds of mixed messages.

The plot concerns two Broadway stars (Meryl Streep and James Corden) and their pals (a woefully underused Nicole Kidman and along-for-the-ride Andrew Rannells) just off the failed opening night of a musical based on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor!). The stars wallow with their friends at a bar where they get the drunken inspiration to take up some sort of humanitarian cause in order to refurbish their brands. It just so happens that a town in Indiana is trending on Twitter for canceling its high school prom because a student asked to bring a same-sex date. The troupe charters a bus to Indiana, and the rest of the film is the self-proclaimed “liberals from Broadway” mixing it up with the small town to get an inclusive prom back on.

Perhaps the saddest thing I’ve seen all in 2020 (and it’s been an unprecedentedly sad year) was seeing the billing of Meryl Streep followed by the name of one James Corden. Over the past weeks, many film and queer outlets have lambasted Corden for his portrayal of a gay man and the actor-turned-late-night-celebrity’s assertion that in real life, he’s a straight guy who just really lurves musicals. Is all the criticism about Corden valid? Yes.

His acting here is truly amateurish. He’s not funny. He’s not sympathetic. He’s not even good at playing narcissistic, which you would think wouldn’t be a problem for him. The guy can sing, I guess. Although he appears to be giving it his all, it’s just not enough. He never comes off as anything more than a fanboy who’s only at the party because of his incessant begging to be invited.

If your curiosity gets the best of you, then you may share my opinion that Keegan-Michael Key steals the show. He, unlike Corden, rises to the occasion of acting against Streep and pulls off legit romantic chemistry. For real, the two are really fun to watch together. It’s too bad they’re not in a better project. In fact, their scenes are so much better than the rest of the film. They seem like they are in a different movie. As for Streep herself… aside from when she’s with Key, her character never really comes to fruition. It’s especially wincing to watch her try this diva-comes-to-small-town character when Catherine O’Hara nailed it across six seasons playing Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek.

In a way, lyricist Chad Beguelin and composer Matthew Sklar’s musical, which opened on Broadway in 2018, might have been written as a tribute to director Murphy’s career-making TV musical, Glee. It has all the prerequisites: a reliance on archetypes over fully realized characters, one-dimensional views over political complexity, and hackneyed jokes, some of which have been ripped off from funnier material. To give an example: Rannells’s character is famous for his work on a ‘90s sitcom called Talk to the Hand, a bit much funnier when The Simpsons did it 21 years ago.

In regards to the musical numbers, some are embarrassing to watch. Rannells looks zonked out on Xanax throughout, choosing to inflect a deep voice for some reason as an out of work actor. His big number, in which he goes to the mall to get the skinny on why the local teens are so antigay, comes off as a guy in his 30s creeping on a group of kids.

Entire scenes seem designed just for the sake of a character saying the name of a product or company. Not one but two musical numbers are set in the mall where all the storefronts of the participating sponsors are proudly on display. It’s as if the plot’s basic message, “Why can’t everyone get along?” is followed closely with, “This message brought to you by [insert brand name here].” The plot is happenstance to a consumerist and conformist message.

Sidenote: What year is this supposed to take place? Kids don’t hang out in malls anymore. Not even in Indiana.

Along that line, The Prom makes it out like everyone in the high school is antigay. Oh yeah, I haven’t even described the main story line, which gets shoved to the side pretty early on in favor of the lives of the Broadway folk. Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman) is an out-lesbian in a school that doesn’t appear to have a single other LGBTQ+ person in sight nor a Gay-Straight Alliance nor any queer community members coming to her aid. The girl she wants to take to the dance is the closeted Alyssa (Ariana DeBose), who happens to be the daughter of the PTA president (Kerry Washington), who is also the loudest voice behind making the prom for straights only.

The call-to-arms of The Prom is hard to believe in 2020, even for a fictional small town in Indiana. I live in rural Illinois, one state over. I know Indiana is much more of a red state than perhaps the Chicagoland area of my home state, but rural communities like mine have been having inclusive proms for around 20 years now.

The fictional town of The Prom, Edgewater, also doesn’t look as Podunk as the movie makes it out to be. Besides having a thriving shopping mall in the age of online shopping, the town’s high school looks clean and fancy and somewhat inclusive—it even has a Black principal—so it’s a real stretch to believe a community as bougie as this would reject one same-sex couple from attending a school dance. Maybe if there was a strong evangelical presence, but the film only addresses that in just one song, and even then the kids are so easily swayed to drop their Christian beliefs that they couldn’t have been that sold on them in the first place.

The Prom is the kind of glib commercial propaganda queer youth and their allies should rebel against, not blindly consume and shrug off as frivolous entertainment. So please, if you have an LGBTQ+ kid at home who watches this, inform this viewer what a lot of us now realize as adults: the kids in high school who didn’t go to prom were the real cool kids. Those behind this film are the sad ones who never quite figured that out.