A teenage girl is ambushed by her parents. They want her to confess to being a lesbian. Their evidence: she likes tofu, keeps a Melissa Etheridge poster, and does not enjoy kissing her boyfriend.

BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER, Jamie Babbit's 1999 debut feature, opens there and only gets bolder.

Megan gets shipped to True Directions, a residential conversion-therapy camp, and the film's master stroke is how the place looks. The whole camp is built from aggressively gendered color, a pink-and-blue dollhouse where girls learn housework and boys chop wood, the set design itself doing the satire.

Natasha Lyonne plays Megan with a wide-eyed sincerity that keeps the comedy warm rather than cruel. Clea DuVall is the camp's resident skeptic and the reason Megan's "cure" goes sideways. RuPaul appears out of drag as an ex-gay counselor, a piece of casting that is its own punchline.

Critics in 2000 were lukewarm. The film outlived them. It is now a foundational queer comedy, sweet under the satire, with a real argument: the closet is the only thing here that needs curing.