Movies Like Beach Rats
If you loved Beach Rats's Drama and Romance storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks

Moonlight
The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.

Love, Simon
Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online.

Nowhere
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

A Perfect Ending
This intimate drama follows Rebecca, a woman who has kept her sexuality a secret from her friends but chooses to reveal it to a stranger. While Rebecca's revelations may not yield the results she expects, a perfect ending is still in reach.

Three Months
Caleb, a South Florida teen, loves his camera, his weed and his grandmother. On the eve of his high school graduation, everything changes when he's exposed to HIV. While he waits three months for his results, Caleb finds love in the most unlikely of places.

Kids
A group of bored, disaffected New York City teenagers spend a day skating, smoking, drinking, partying, deflowering virgins, and getting into fights.

Making Love
A perfect typical LA couple find their happily-ever-after life broken when the husband confronts his long-repressed attraction for other men.

My Policeman
In the late 1990s, the arrival of elderly invalid Patrick into Marion and Tom’s home triggers the exploration of seismic events from 40 years previous: the passionate relationship between Tom and Patrick at a time when homosexuality was illegal.
More Movies Like Beach Rats

Departure
An English mother and her teenage son spend a week preparing the sale of their remote holiday house in the South of France. Fifteen-year-old Elliot struggles with his dawning sexuality and an increasing alienation from his mother, Beatrice. She in turn is confronted by the realisation that her marriage to his father, Philip, has grown loveless and the life she knows is coming to an end. When an enigmatic local teenager, Clément, quietly enters their lives, both mother and son are compelled to confront their desires and, finally, each other.

The Adjuster
An uptight insurance man and his film-censor wife become a kinky couple's landlords.

Appropriate Behavior
Shirin is struggling to become an ideal Persian daughter, politically correct bisexual and hip young Brooklynite but fails miserably in her attempt at all identities.

Camp Belvidere
Camp Belvidere is a lesbian romance set in the 1950s about the coming of age of Camp Leader Rose and her forbidden encounter with Nurse Gin. It depicts the journey and evolution of a friendship into a romance between two women when their rapport would have been unlikely.

Maurice
After his lover rejects him, Maurice attempts to come to terms with his sexuality within the restrictiveness of Edwardian society.

The Art of Getting By
George, a lonely and fatalistic teen who's made it all the way to his senior year without ever having done a real day of work, is befriended by Sally, a popular but complicated girl who recognizes in him a kindred spirit.

Benjamin
Benjamin, a rising star filmmaker, is on the brink of premiering his difficult second film No Self at the London Film Festival when Billie, his hard drinking publicist, introduces him to a mesmeric French musician called Noah.


Elena Undone
The wife of a pastor who preaches against homosexuality embarks on an affair with a female writer.

Mammal
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.

All Over Me
Claude and Ellen are best friends who live in a not-so-nice area of New York. They're involved in the subculture of 90s youth, complete with drugs, live music, and homophobia. All is changed one night when a violent and meaningless death rocks their lives.

The Object of My Affection
A pregnant New York social worker begins to develop romantic feelings for her gay best friend, and decides she'd rather raise her child with him, much to the dismay of her overbearing boyfriend.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Beach Rats (2017): Drama and Romance themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Beach Rats.
See full details for Beach Rats (2017)