BENTONVILLE FF REVIEW: Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow’s AHEAD OF THE CURVE follows incredible rise of lesbian-focused Curve and founder, Franco Stevens

Have you ever thought about how lucky you are to pick up a magazine that makes you feel good? Yeah, a trivial magazine just like in the supermarket. Or, if maybe not “feel good,” how about just find a magazine which reflects something about your identity? Like something about rock and roll or celebrities or cooking or science or whatever? It seems like a mundane and unimportant thing, a sentiment I would probably have shared until I saw Jen Rainin’s and Rivkah Beth Medow’s compelling documentary, Ahead of the Curve. It follows the rise of the nation’s premiere lesbian-focused magazine, Curve (formally known as Deneuve) and the engaging story of its founder, Franco Stevens. In a content-rich environment where you may feel like you’ve heard it all, here comes the unlikely underdog story which is at once wholly relatable and entirely novel – unless you lived through the experience of an America before lesbian acceptance and the media empire which challenged those norms.

The main focus of the narrative centers around Stevens, who went from “regular married girl” to liberated out-and-proud media empress. Without giving too much away this is literally a rags-to-riches story about a person punished for being who they are, only to find redemption with an incredible success. Recounting the almost miraculous ways in which Stevens scraped up resources and support to establish a groundbreaking periodical from literally living in her car will stretch credulity even as it inspires. This is one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” tales which ends up being for real. And while all of this is very uplifting, it’s also important to remember, what victories you see on screen didn’t come at a low price. Gambles were made – even on literal horseraces – and things could have gone very differently. All of this, of course, leads to a sort-of final victory which is all the sweeter.

Rainin and Medow do a good job of pacing the drama of the narrative (minus a few lags of “talking heads” segments) and let me tell you, there is drama in this story. The real-life ups and downs found in Ahead of the Curve include everything from loan sharks to celebrity lawsuits to life-altering accidents which most people wouldn’t see in three lifetimes, let alone Franco’s one. But in the midst of all this madness, the real goal was for lesbian women to have a place where they could just be themselves. And the magazine helped pioneer that space. Listening to the recounting of what came before and how things transformed is pretty much summed up in one sentence from an activist’s interview: “They’ve wanted us to be invisible for so long that any type of visibility is political.” Yes, just walking down the street holding hands with your partner used to be a radical act. Nowadays not so much. And Curve magazine was one of the spearheads in that transformation.

Amazingly, the film also finds plenty of room to reveal the mistakes Stevens and company made. In one painful confession, it is admitted they didn’t have enough representation of black lesbian women for the first years of the publication. There was also a banal “make everybody look gorgeous and sexy” ethos meant to sell magazines (which, of course, they needed to do). But another inspiration here is watching how these folks learned their lessons and keep on striving for inclusivity of all types of lesbian women. Recollections include the “lusting after the women on the covers” – which in a straight, male magazine would be considered “normal” during the 80s and 90s when Franco blazed a new trail. But then that’s the whole point of the endeavor. “Normalizing” natural tendencies is yet another thing non-outsiders take for granted. These women might have been seen as “different” in the pre-Curve era but are just like everybody else. They want to live and love and be who they are freely and want to see themselves reflected in the culture. The only real difference is that unlike dominant segments of society, they had to fight for even that basic bit of normalcy. This insight is the gift Ahead of the Curve imparts to the audience, and I for one am grateful for it.