In some ways, it feels like a lot of coming-of-age dramas, but writer/director Eliza Hittman shows there's plenty you can do with a familiar set-up. In contemporary Brooklyn, teenager Leila (Gina Piersanto) is trying to negotiate adolescence without a mother, and unsure how much she wants to be like her more sexually experienced best friend, even as she becomes fascinated with a hot college-age guy. The film is intensely observational, which could easily have been code for “not a damn thing happens.” But Hittman is confident enough to let us walk with Leila through nuanced variations on her tentative experimentations, all while showing how profoundly uninformed she seems to be about becoming a woman. It's a lovely, heartbreaking performance, and even when a few of the situations become repetitive, there's still rich material here that understands how terrifying it can be to be on the cusp of womanhood simultaneously afraid to become sexually experienced, and afraid
not to. (Scott Renshaw)
