The “hiding in plain sight” identity of an undercover police officer is turned into a shrewd metaphor for the closet in Carmen Emmi’s striking, yet flawed, debut feature, Plainclothes. Taking place in 1997, in upstate New York, the film investigates the homophobic police practices of that time (which, of course, are not all consigned to the past), seeing the presence of a closeted officer – played by rising British actor Tom Blyth – as a symbol of this hypocrisy and depicting the whole affair as further torture for a young man unable to embrace his real identity. The film premiered in Sundance’s US Dramatic Competition, despite its large UK backing (perhaps connected to its above-the-line talent); it showed last week at the first edition of SXSW London.

Emmi’s work is at once in full control of his actors’ rapport and the dramatic escalation, but he lets the narrative structure slip out of his grasp, lamentably making it a mixed success. The film eventually expands beyond its grabby first-act hook, but its irony is too neat: Blyth’s character, Lucas, is the point man for a police sting operation in the downstairs area of an era-perfect suburban mall, where he must lure in and then arrest gay men attempting to cruise. First, he whisks his target away to the nearby restrooms with a single charged glance or gentle arm signal, allows them to expose themselves in a stall, before the unlucky chap is cuffed by the loitering standby officers after walking out. Blyth excels at capturing the internal fissures of this being one of his only opportunities to meet suitable men, in spite of the criminal risk he’ll ultimately expose them to (indeed, he’s also in a relationship with a woman, played by Amy Forsyth, to whom he’s gradually revealing his true sexuality).

When the older, more domesticated-looking Andrew (Russell Tovey) is able to slip Lucas a phone number on crumpled paper, carefully evading the sting, the film’s dynamic changes to chart their growing relationship and the other cautious methods by which gay men had to meet, and conduct their lives, in the pre-app era, with the conservative moral panic around AIDS still at large. Coming from this part of the USA himself (captured in sleepy, grey tones, with period-perfect production design on all the strip-mall car parks and church welcome signs), Emmi’s personal investment can be felt strongly, as he expresses with tenderness how queer connection once had to be found in his own patch, some years before he came of age himself.

As another strand involving Lucas’s dysfunctional Italian-American family comes to bear, and with the audience also trying to mentally focus through the chaotic visual resolution-shifting that Emmi employs in the cinematography (evoking both the flickers of memory and the spy-camera techniques the cops use as evidence), we feel Plainclothes’ threads becoming unwieldy, with the director’s passion and willingness to say so much overwhelming more focused artistic decisions. Yet the film still holds you, and has resonated with audiences and distributors so far, being another relevant queer story from bygone and more intolerant times, where pride always competed with shame.

Plainclothes is a UK-US co-production, staged by Lorton Entertainment, Page 1 Entertainment, Podwall Entertainment and Mini Productions. Its world sales are courtesy of Magnify Films.