Brothers Chet and Todd grew up very different in the shadow of their embittered father (Vincent Duvall, THE BIG BAD CITY). Chet was the school jock while Todd was the star of the drama club. The only thing they had in common was that they were both gay; one was able to hide it while the other never learned to be anything but himself. While Chet (Mark Strano, OUT TO KILL) stayed behind and helped his father run the local hardware store, dodging questions about getting married and having children while "window shopping" the local cruising grounds. Todd (Frankie Valenti, THE LAIR) ran away to Los Angeles to become an actor, but survives on couch surfing and house-sitting jobs. When items stolen during a party at his latest job result in Todd living out of his car, he heads home to find Chet unwilling to let him loaf around the house with business slow and longtime friend/worker Ann (Loanne Bishop, KALIFORNIA) in need of a vacation. As Todd reconnects with old friends and enemies, he stirs things up and riles up the small-minded locals. Chet is worried about how his brother's behavior reflects on him, but he is also thinking about pursuing a relationship when the Brandon (Gregory Marcel, SUNKISSED), the former "closet case" he messed around with in high school, comes back to town and makes romantic overtures. When a stoned Todd makes a move on Brandon, the brothers have an explosive falling out that threatens to plunge both back into their self-destructive old habits.

Wade Gasque's TIGER ORANGE is somewhat uneven and predictable in some respects, but it is an impressive feature debut that takes some familiar tropes of "you can't go home again"-style family dramas and neatly reconfigures them within a gay coming out story (which is also a kind of emotional "coming of age"). Although the film has a semi-triangular relationship between three gay characters, the crux of the film is not a love story but the way in which the blow-up between the two brothers becomes about all of the underlying extension of the jealousy, envy, and resentments between them. Growing up gay in a small, close-minded town, these two should have had more in common than blood; but their estrangement as gay men (over another man) seems to mirror that of their sibling relationship in which both felt inadequate in different ways to their father (who Chet resents for the way he treated Todd while he must have known that he too was gay). The small town bigotry is also amusingly rendered in their distinction between good gay guys like Chet and equating the "in your face" ones like Chet with the detested Los Angeles weekenders ("If you're from L.A., you oughta turn in your cellphone and wear a tag, so we all know who the hell you are").