Unapologetic Filmmaking Meets Unapologetic Style: Alexander Justin Gonzales' Directorial Debut Turns Icons Into Fans

Mean Boys dropped in December, with additional streaming platforms coming this year. The underdog independent filmmaker who made it? A true triple threat in the film industry. He served as Art Director for a streetwear brand in its founding years, commercializing paint on textile. Earlier this year, he debuted his visual art with El Niño Pescado, but in Mean Boys he brings this triple threat energy to the screen, writing, producing, and directing. It took home Best LGBTQ feature at the 2025 LA Film Festival, where reviews that followed highlight its fearless honesty on youth drug use and daring character complexity.

Mean Boys style, both in story and costume, is inspired by past delusions of security and a swift desire for departure from polite, queer stereotypes. The story centers around a bisexual group of popular troublemakers on the brink of graduation, covertly complicating each other's lives across Southern California’s sun-bleached suburbs. The jocks kiss each other, desire is weaponized, and every friendship borders on infatuation and obsession. Gonzales keeps the tone voyeuristic as the story follows school stalker Ira Scholsberg's rise and fall from Archer High grace. In this world, camp humor is armor, tenderness is weakness, and personal style is the package adorning the rebellion.

The costumes are referential to the early 2000's, while still feeling current enough to not draw attention from the present. Gonzales wanted the vibe of suburban-teen-core filtered through the chaos of celebrity-obsessed culture at its peak. For example, a mainstay accessory of one of the core popular boys, Cam, aka "Foxy," is a signature pearl choker, an unapologetic symbol through a daily accessory choice that femininity and masculinity are playgrounds these characters use as tools for manipulation and seduction.

The film's fearless approach to queerness is already resonating with influential voices across entertainment. 80s Billboard icon Angelyne herself affectionately called Mean Boys "Adorably filmed and GAYLY entertaining."

Through his company COA Pictures, Gonzales refuses the old system’s gatekeeping customs. "I'm not a fast-fashion filmmaker," he says. As a bisexual man himself, Gonzales is faithful to the gays through and through, pushing for more diverse and nuanced representation driven by a craving for authenticity, not fear or acceptance.

Earlier projects Guadalajara and Children of the Cloth traveled beyond the festival circuit, screening multiple times domestically as well as abroad, helping shape innovative marketing styles for microbudgets in a time of transformation in the entertainment industry where distribution is a mounting challenge. Mean Boys becomes the first to merge that aesthetic with a wider Gen Z audience that craves a good Y2K-style scandal in place of the modernized TV hits. Will it bring Millennials and Gen Z together? Only time will tell.

One would say this third film of his may be the charm, as timing seems to fit the demands of current culture. According to some streaming and audience demand insights, digital content demand has shifted significantly, with audiences increasingly seeking new and diverse voices beyond major studio pipelines. Independent digital releases have seen notable growth, as audiences continue the hunt for new voices beyond repetitive trends. Gonzales understands this shift because he is part of it and has no plans on stopping anytime soon. His work feels surreal but cinematic, built for streaming yet alive with potential for more. Viewers don’t just watch his world; they can both fantasize within and relate to it at the same time. Giving all who view the space to break and rebuild without apology, just like the characters.

COA Pictures expands beyond film production with an online merch store also featuring textiles and wearable art drawn from its visual palettes and content. Gonzales keeps writing, painting, and planning the next reinvention, proving that representation isn’t a suggestion or a request, but a requirement as a foundation for artistic excellence.

Mean Boys stands stubbornly tall as a statement where independent cinema is doubling down: where the audience gets stylishly inclusive and fearless instead of cautionary, condescending, and patronizingly tragic. It’s a film that lives in the tension just beneath the surface — restless, vivid, and already streaming into the future.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.