The dramatist Annie Baker won a Pulitzer for her stage play The Flick, about listless, bored ushers in an empty cinema auditorium between screenings; now she makes her feature debut, writing and directing a very personal movie about an 11-year-old girl spending a fraught summer with her mum in her rural Massachusetts home in the summer of 1991. The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.
The performances are strong, but the writing is such that the characters’ passions, fears and grievances are in some way veiled; yet there is subtlety and indirectness in this. Julianne Nicholson is very good as single-mum Janet, who has recently completed her training as an acupuncturist and now has a practice funkily branded “Janet Planet”; her daughter Lacy (good stuff from the newcomer Zoe Ziegler) hates summer camp and makes a plaintive payphone call to come home so she can moon about the house all summer long.
