Appropriate Behavior begins with a small declaration of priorities. As Shirin (Desiree Akhavan) takes the last of her boxes out of her ex-girlfriend’s apartment, drops them into the nearest dumpster, sees a strap-on in the top box, and decides to take it with her as she strolls down the street. This brief vignette could work as a self-contained short film, saying so much with almost no words. As evocative a glimpse the opening is, however, the full feature takes pains to erase any simplistic summary of Shirin, who loves to state her ethnic and sexual identities upfront more to convince herself that they mean something than to inform others.
Scenes of Shirin tackling these identities are fraught with awkward interactions and nervous miscommunication. Around her doting, oblivious parents—“You should get into hand modeling!” her mother marvels in an excruciating display of patronization—Shirin feels the need to behave conservatively despite their outward liberalism, and she regularly invokes Iran as the reason for her reticence to speak freely about her sexuality when the only visible barrier is her own hangups. We see some of those in a scene where Shirin meets future-ex Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) and announces her bisexuality simply to defend using a gay slur to awkwardly hit on the other woman, something Maxine rightly shuts down. Shirin invokes her identities as if she were an unbelievable character, the sort of person a movie executive would nix on the rewrite level for being too many things for an audience to believe.
What the film slowly draws out is the fact that being Iranian and bisexual is not the root of Shirin’s being, but fixed points on a vast graph on which she can plot her life. Akhavan plays Shirin like the only person in Brooklyn who hasn’t found her niche, never pausing to consider that the arty personae her friends and acquaintances put forth might be as much a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves as Shirin’s wish for the basic circumstances of her identity to make her seem wild and contradictory. On a conversational level, however, the film regularly pokes fun at the flightiness of twentysomethings who approach every encounter with a nebulous mix of competition, self-regard, and loneliness. In Shirin’s aforementioned, disastrous meeting with Maxine, the latter icily regards the protagonist’s fumbling pick-up lines until getting worn down by sheer curiosity and Shirin’s ultimate come-on: “I hate so many things, too.”
Akhavan has an ear for brutally effective dialogue, carefully honed to oblivious microaggressions and the simple gamesmanship of young New York life. Interviewing for a position teaching videography to kindergarteners (don’t ask), Shirin must face the stoned principal (Scott Adsit) eagerly asking, “Iran. Whoa. What do you think of that whole situation?” Friends are both enablers and rivals: there’s a sweetness in Shirin behaving like a heartbroken child by lying on her bed and moaning to a friend, “I’m gonna lie here and try to forget what it feels like to be loved. Can you turn out the light?” Likewise, the use of rebound dates as a form of sport leads to fantastically bitter exchanges and furious hype that inflates OKCupid hookups into medieval dueling champions, unwittingly fighting for their ladies’ honor.
As Shirin gets more distracted by her attempts to fit in, her previously rigid concepts of her race and sexuality start to mesh with each other, albeit in a way that starts to better articulate more nuanced observations about the overlap. Scenes with Shirin’s extended family start to resemble moments among her lesbian and bisexual friends, a den of gossip and insinuation that subtly compares how the efforts to assimilate while retaining a unique culture align and diverge. Likewise, Akhavan uses family bickering and mutual suspicion as a backdrop to delve into the fractions within LGBT circles, emphasizing how these signifiers are filled with contradictions and conflict. Shirin seems to want to be a stereotype and is stymied by her inability to choose the aspect of her personality by which to define herself, but Appropriate Behavior depicts a woman striving to be a quirky indie protagonist and gradually realizing—first to dismay, then hope—that she’s actually a human being.