Angelica Ross in Framing Agnes (Stephanie Owens/Kino Lorber)

“I don’t know what truth is,” purrs a trans character in Framing Agnes. Chase Joynt’s ultra-meta film wants to make the point that the trans experience contains multiple versions of truth. But Agnes gets in its own way when it comes to presenting an idea of what the truths may be. This hybrid documentary pursues too many different ideas, characters, and conceits.  

Joynt’s 2020 debut feature, co-directed with Aisling Yin-Chee, No Ordinary Man, focused on trans jazz musician Billy Tipton, who lived as a man before being “revealed” as a woman after death to a bewildered family (or a family in denial). No Ordinary Man deployed the ingenious device of filming actors auditioning for the part of Tipton behind the scenes, lending layers to the storytelling as the hopefuls share their own experiences and feelings. Frank discussions of “passing” kept the tone real, and deftly deployed snippets of tabloid TV shone a different light on the mystery.

Joynt relies on many techniques from the first film here. Those cool touches worked in the earlier documentary because they were based on a simple structure: One figure, Billy Tipton, formed the spoke from which every other theme radiated. Framing Agnes, however, jumps between multiple points of view. busily switches directions. creates personas who have no connection to each other, cuts to off-camera business, and name-checks pop culture, all the while commenting coyly on what it’s doing. 

The main story line ostensibly follows a real-life transwoman who posed as an intersex person in order to infiltrate a notorious 1960s sexual research institute run by the University of California at Los Angeles. Trans director Zackary Drucker, as Agnes, is done up to the nines in period garb and looks ravishing—Joynt and team’s reenactments do an arty, sexy, and beautiful job of bringing out the character’s mystique. 

We never do really find the end results of the undercover gambit, though. Footage of 1950s icon Christine Jorgenson plays out of the blue as academic Jules Gill-Peterson discusses Jorgenson’s va-va-voom influence. Joynt plays the institute’s head, Dr Harold Garfinkel, and acts out transcripts of the 1960s interviews with trans patients, only in the format of an old-school black-and-white talk show—Joynt’s brittle delivery wears thin in this protracted artifice. But then we suddenly see the same characters talking to the camera in lavish color interiors. The switch is eye-catching but feels like a self-interruption. 

Additionally, the different acting styles don’t mesh. Stories are intriguing but cut short by actors talking about how they feel about their characters. The film even settles scores with Katie Couric over an offensive interview with trans icons Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera that took place in 2014—that’s almost 10 years ago—and a teen transman is played by 30-year-old Stephen Ira, who looks nothing like a teenager (but who happens to be the adult child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening). 

Covers of secrecy around trans life need to be lifted. Authentic voices should be heard. Framing Agnes gets close to breaking the silence when it lets some of its characters breathe and say their piece before rushing them offscreen. Jen Richards and Angelica Ross offer plaintive, confiding performances as breaths of sincerity from the pre-internet age, before people shared sex tapes and tweeted their kinks. Ross’s character lays down, “Either you like me like this or you don’t like me at all, cause I can’t be anyone else but me.” Thoughtful, dignified—and simple. Framing Agnes is ambitious and eclectic, but it needs more moments like that one.