Joel on Film

Girls Like Girls isn’t too far removed from the typical stories about a teen girl coming of age, although the screenplay by director Hayley Kiyoko and Stefanie Scott does begin with its protagonist in a slightly different place emotionally than we might expect from this story. It’s not so much that Coley (newcomer Maya da Costa) needs to figure out who she loves in order to figure out who she is. She’s already figured most of that out by the time we meet her, and instead, we’re introduced to a grieving daughter who has recently lost her mother, the only person who might have understood her and the one person whose absence makes it impossible for her to know the newest development in Coley’s life.

The stakes, then, do not really reside within what Coley has left unsaid to the world around her but, rather, what she didn’t say to the most important person in her life while she had the time and various opportunities to do so. Not having had that outlet for the year or so since her mom’s death now means she feels a great deal of insecurity about telling anybody else, even though she doesn’t really keep it a secret from anybody for very long. The secret, if one can call it that, is, as the title gives away, that Coley has no interest in boys her age and a lot of interest in girls—one, eventually and primarily, in particular.

The structure of the story is fairly typical, to be sure, as Coley falls in love, deals with the fallout of those feelings and that shift, then fights to keep the relationship alive as relatively small distractions and disagreements and a big falling-out, with a simple path to reconciliation, rear their heads. Kiyoko’s treatment of it, which clearly comes from a personal place, is what turns this familiar material into an affecting and compassionate execution of that material. The origins speak to just how personal it is to Kiyoko, by the way.

The title comes from the 2015 pop song, which led to a viral music video (which co-starred Scott, as it happens) and, eventually, a novel that is the basis of this adaptation. The filmmaker might have lived with the source material for about a decade (and probably longer than that, given how long it does occasionally take to write a song of tremendous personal importance). She’s lived with the experiences reflected in this story, though, for probably as long as she’s detected romantic feelings for other people, and as this movie takes place in 2006, that’s a sign of the longevity.

The specific story here follows Coley over the course of a single summer—her first in a new city with her dad (played by Zach Braff), who had left his wife and daughter years before and is now forced into the position of caregiver. She resents him for his abandonment and resists his attempts to get to know her better, although it’s refreshing to find a story in which the father’s feelings about all this are quite distinctive from his daughter’s. Braff is appropriately awkward in a carefully written role, as a man whose own resentments rub up against those of his daughter on account of his own, complicated feelings about his late ex-wife.

Coley is understandably withdrawn in public until she happens upon a group of friends, who include the local cool guy Trenton (Levon Hawke) and his girlfriend Sonya (Myra Molloy), on their way to swim in a local pond. It’s love at first sight once Coley lays eyes upon Sonya, and we can sense that in the other direction, as well. The two become fast friends, bonding over Sonya’s love of and skill at dancing, but only one of these girls is truly insecure about the impression it will give people to seem together, which is what drives this specific drama.

The summer unfolds, and so does a will-they-won’t-they tension between the girls, played well by both da Costa and Molloy, that means we’re in familiar territory dramatically speaking. It’s not really a case, though, of the so-called Idiot Plot at work, because Kiyoko and Scott are much smarter than that. Coley, for instance, can predict all the insecurities to be voiced by Sonya as they drift apart (a major fracture point being an extended period of absence, during which Coley must move on, find a job and enter a new groove in order to feel even a little bit normal), while Sonya has her own relationship, in which the gradually annoying Trenton is still a third part of the calculus, to consider.

The movie is more intelligent, then, to focus on what this relationship means at this particular moment in time for these two than to rely solely on a lot of melodrama or contrivances. Each of the phases in the relationship at the center of Girls Like Girls makes sturdy emotional sense and, especially in the case of a late confrontation between the two, is built upon a foundation of honesty.

Rating: *** (out of ****)