“Lez Bomb” Is a Lesbian Comedy of Errors and Coming Out Story, Wrapped in a Family Holiday Film

Families are messy and complicated, and holidays are messy and complicated, and there are dozens of movies about women taking home their boyfriends (and men taking home their girlfriends) for the first time on Thanksgiving or Christmas — and all the messy, complicated hijinks that ensue. Lez Bomb, by writer/director Jenna Laurenzo, is the first feature film to take that age-old formula and put a queer woman at the center of it.

Lauren (also Jenna Laurenzo!) is a Brooklyn-based writer in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She and Hailey (Caitlin Mehner) are incandescently happy, and have been for six entire months, and Lauren is ready to come out to her family. The plan is simple: Lauren will go to New Jersey for Thanksgiving an hour earlier than Hailey, casually tell her parents she’s gay, and then pick up Hailey at the train station when she arrives for some delicious turkey and dressing and a warm, relaxing day with her entire family. Well, Lauren’s mom’s still in mourning for her father who recently died, and her dad’s operating straight out of Robert Di Niro’s Meet the Fockers playbook, and her brother is a lazy cad, and her one uncle is dealing drugs and her other uncle is recovering from cancer and her grandparents are nosy and super religious and her cousin is an angry youth, and oh yes, her roommate, Austin, whose relationship with Hailey is already cold and antagonistic, shows up announced. The simple coming out plan fails spectacularly.

I cannot stress enough that this is a true and traditional comedy of errors, brushing up against all the tropes that have been built atop the stock plot since Elizabethans embraced it centuries ago. Interrupted conversations, misunderstandings, characters witnessing other characters’ hidden actions, secrets, confusion, delusion, innuendos innuendos innuendos, and gimmicky plot points galore. Also, true to Shakespearian form, everyone’s kind an asshole. (Even the lesbians!) (But you’re really going to hate most of these men.) Comedies of errors have always stressed me out, but what makes Lez Bomb work for me is Lauren and Hailey’s relationship. In a movie full of purposeful contrivances, they feel real and anchored in a way that’s still so rare on-screen — and I cannot resist two women getting a heart-pounding, big-gesture, rom-com happy ending.

I also love movies that get their hands dirty talking about how weird everyone’s family is, and how sometimes it only becomes apparent to you when you bring home a person to meet them for the first time. All families have so many different group dynamic going on inside them; introducing a new person to the mix is always a loaded experience. And, the other side of that coin, which is how the one-on-one alchemy you share with your partner comes under a special kind of pressure when you’re with your families, especially when your partnership defies tradition.

It’s also fun (and uncommon) to watch a coming out story presented in a way you’ve never seen it before. Even if they’re not traumatic, on-screen coming outs are hardly ever whimsical. No one ever launches a turkey at a bridge and tunnel drug cartel during them, just for one example. As a person who’s been writing about LGBTQ pop culture for over a decade, I can always tell when a screenwriter is well-versed in queer film and TV canon. It didn’t surprise me when I heard Laurenzo say one of her mentors is Rose Troche and that her research for Lez Bomb included casually cueing up old episodes of South of Nowhere. Movies made by queer women about queer women just feel different.

Lez Bomb was one of the most anticipated films making the rounds on the LGBTQ festival circuit this year. I saw it in a packed theater at NewFest. It makes sense: It features an absolutely all-star cast in Cloris Leachman, Bruce Dern, Kevin Kane, Steve Guttenberg, Bobby Farrelly, Elaine Hendrix, and Deirdre O’Connell (who is brilliant and hilarious and heartbreaking as Lauren’s mom). It also doesn’t hurt that Laurenzo, whose main work before this was the short film Girl Night Stand, is attached to Peter Farrelly’s Oscar-buzzy Green Book. And while reviews have been mixed, and while Lez Bomb certainly doesn’t hit all the shots it takes, I think it’s a really important (and entertaining) step forward.

How many other queer feature films can you point to that are maddening comedies and sweet rom-coms, wrapped up like the warm holiday films we grew up watching about straight people? Queering heteronormative tropes is certainly my favorite way to spend Thanksgiving.

Lez Bomb opens in NYC at the Roxy Cinema and in LA at Universal Cinema AMC at CityWalk Hollywood on November 9th. You can also preorder it through iTiunes

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1719 articles for us.

8 Comments

    • And yes, I’m well aware I said christmas when I meant Thankgiving, I’m dumb and I don’t think we can edit.

  1. Comedies of errors usually make anxious and I stare at the screen wanting to shout ‘just communicate with each other, jeez’ but YAY lesbian content, so I’m going to give this a go.

  2. This sounds like one of those movies I’ll be pretending to watch but really I’ll be running away every time it gets too anxiety-making, which could be quite often judging from the trailer – my sprinter reflexes were on high alert 20 seconds in LOL

    Seriously it’s good to have a contender in this genre. I’ll just have to build up my tolerance by watching old Ellen episodes (I’m sweating already)

  3. I watched this over Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m so glad I did! Even though stressful/cringey/comedy or errors type comedy makes me sweat, I was able to watch almost this entire thing not from behind my fingers! I agree that the relationship felt real and cute, and that helped a lot. Also their big argument felt biig but also surmountable, which is always a hard balance. Thanks for the review!

  4. I randomly found this movie on Kanopy, my library’s streaming app, and laughed so hard I had to pause the film multiple times!

    I’m glad AS already had an article/review on it, because I as about to submit it to the A+ box as a movie to recommend! I really liked Happiest Season last year but I found Lez Bomb incredibly funny and relatable. The brother who comes home with his laundry bc he doesn’t actually know how to do it? Def something that happens in my fam. The relatives who arrive too early and specifically the mom telling them to go to the living room? Every,single.holiday. I loved the portrayal of the relationship between Lauren and Hailey, and all the classic missteps/innuendo/interrupted conversations were great. What a fun romp. And I appreciated the ending/Lauren’s growth.

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