The premise of Bill Duke’s new film Cover (which opens Friday in select cities) is enough to make any gay man who has been repeatedly burned by the motion picture industry reach for a Kevlar vest: following a murder, a devout Christian woman is brought in as a suspect, only to reveal that her secretly-gay husband may have been having an affair with the victim and infected her with HIV in the process.

Call it Law & Order: Special Cruising Unit.

A film that straddles earnest social commentary and throwaway mystery thriller without managing to succeed at either, Cover is, if nothing else, in a class all by itself. Sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of genres and themes, the film starts out a pulpy police procedural, morphs into a Sirkian “women’s picture, ” and closes as a cautionary melodrama, while trying on the costumes of thriller, murder mystery, AIDS drama, and evangelical recruitment video along the way.

When stripped down to its basics, Cover is at its core about a woman who learns that her loving husband is gay after the couple and their daughter move to Philadelphia, where her husband attended college. It turns out that his old college buddies – though outwardly straight – are kind of the Krystal and Alexis of the affluent “Down-low” set: that is, men who have sex with men though leading otherwise heterosexual lives with wives, girlfriends, etc.

The DL phenomenon is one that has gotten much attention in recent years, even inspiring a television show, The DL Chronicles, on here!, the gay pay-per-view television network. Though the phenomenon of closeted men having secret gay sex is by no means race-specific, DL almost exclusively refers to men of color, and this is the paradigm of the film as all the characters are upper- to middle-class men and women of color.

The DL phenomenon is not a subject that many directors would – or should – attempt. Bill Duke has spent decades working in television and film both as an actor and as a director, but his feature films (Sister Act 2 [1993], Hoodlum [1997], A Rage in Harlem [1991]) are of a considerably different tone than a dark drama about sexuality, betrayal, and religion.

Director Bill Duke

In a recent interview with Duke, we asked him why he chose to tackle the DL head-on in this film.