The Starling Girl, the feature debut from writer-director Laurel Parmet, sets forth two difficult, easily muddled tasks. First, striking the correct tonal balance for a sexual relationship separated by age and authority – in this case, an intoxicating, transgressive romance between 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) and her brusquely handsome, 28-year-old youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman, son of actor Bill). And the second, depicting an insular religious community – a group of fundamentalist Christians in present-day Kentucky – with enough specificity and emotional acuity to bridge the gap with viewers who will find such a place opaque, unrelatable or possibly even unbelievable.
Parmet succeeds more on the former than the latter. The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure. It’s ultimately less a portrait of a toxic relationship – that’s not the tone of Owen and Jem’s connection here – than a familiar battle of faith and feelings, intuition versus indoctrination, the fine line between sin and sublime.
