In the past decade or so, the fluidity of gender has inspired a handful of great documentaries, most notably Jennie Livingston's 1990 black New York drag-culture dissection Paris Is Burning and Kate Davis' 2001 rural transgender family drama Southern Comfort. Gabrielle Baur's Venus Boyz doesn't belong in that good company. The film introduces a series of female-to-male impersonators–also known as "drag kings"–and shows samples of their nightclub performances, along with ample, dubious self-justification. Unlike Paris Is Burning and Southern Comfort, which put their subjects in the context of a world where class and domesticity are as important as sexual orientation, Venus Boyz holds tight to its serial profiling, and rises and falls on personalities and points of view. Some of the interviewees have charm and talent, especially the king/queen duo of Dréd Gerestant and Queen Bee Luscious, who spoof the gender politics of R&B, and Bridge Markland, who fuses androgynous comment with dance in theatrical performances that have her stripping off her clothes, then her femininity. Late in the film, Baur turns the camera on the transgendered Del La Grace Volcano, who confronts the issue of body-shaping in complicated conversations that make it clear how sexual assignment can be a matter of deep personal conviction. But Volcano is the exception in Venus Boyz, which is populated mostly by women who dress up as men for ironic effect. Their stage personae tend to be sarcastic, politically loaded, and not half as clever as they think they are. Mo B. Dick has a good bit going when she dresses as a Brad Pitt type and walks around muttering "I'm an independent filmmaker," until it turns out that that's all there is to the routine. Later, she explains the nature of her satire by insisting that "our society doesn't allow for degrees," and that she's protesting how everyone is expected to be either a pretty blonde or a guy's guy. But her understanding of the world is even shallower than the world itself, and she ignores the reality of millions of everyday people. Venus Boyz becomes hard going the longer Baur stretches out the parade of narcissists, all spouting received wisdom, cultural clichés, and bad poetry. It may be that drag kings are as natural and multidimensional as the subjects of Livingston and Davis' films, but the picture Baur paints in the claustrophobic Venus Boyz is of a group of unsympathetic, detached, self-selected (and self-obsessed) outsiders.