When we first meet Lea (Lily McInerny), the shy, watchful 17-year-old protagonist of "Palm Trees and Power Lines," she's wandering off by herself at sunset, listening to music and losing herself in thought. Those power lines stretch out in the distance behind her, a drab symbol of American suburban anomie; in one upward-glancing shot they seem to form, briefly, the bars of a cage. Another summer is under way, and Lea has spent much of it doing the same things day after day: sunbathing, smoking, staring down at her phone, hurling clipped remarks and sullen glares at her well-meaning single mom (a warm Gretchen Mol) and, most of all, wasting time with the teenagers she calls her friends.
They're not her friends, not really, with the possible exception of Amber (Quinn Frankel), the less-than-trustworthy pal with whom she exchanges secrets and gossip. One of the secondary subjects of this tough, absorbing, meticulously controlled movie is the creeping vacuity of so much contemporary teen culture — a culture in which Lea participates without feeling entirely of it. Sure, she drinks with the other kids, laughs at their dumb, raunchy jokes and even casually hooks up with one of them. But as the guy paws at her in his backseat, the camera locks in on Lea's dark, watchful eyes and registers a flash of something between boredom and terror: a gnawing fear that life may never get much more exciting or meaningful than this.
She's not entirely correct, though she may wish she had been. Directed by Jamie Dack, who based it on her same-titled 2018 short film, "Palm Trees and Power Lines" starts off as a depressive snapshot of youthful ennui and soon becomes a stark, harrowing story of predation and abuse. That story proper begins when a group dine-and-dash attempt goes wrong and Lea, the only one with enough moral sense to object to the prank, is predictably left holding the bag. That's when a man named Tom (Jonathan Tucker) seemingly comes to her rescue. After fending off a restaurant worker, he chases after Lea, pulls up alongside her in his pickup truck and gives her a ride home. Tom is assertive and good-looking; he's also 34, something he discloses with a candor that's disarming yet also, in its way, deceptive. He has more to hide than the fact that he's twice her age.
