Girls Like Girls is gay, and (mostly) proud of it. The film is Hayley Kiyoko’s adaptation of her novel of the same title, which was based on her song of the same title. An inception of girls liking girls liking girls. Coley (Maya da Costa), a teenager living with her dad in the wake of her mother’s death, spends one fateful summer falling in love with the crackling Sonya (Myra Molloy) and hanging out with her roaming posse of cool girls and skinny dudes who look like Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s son (although only the actor who plays Sonya’s “boyfriend” is the actual Hawke offspring).
It’s the kind of tropey “summer before adulthood” watering holes and diners and backyard pools that these teens like to frequent, but the spaces this film chooses to occupy more closely are intimate and isolated by contrast. Girls Like Girls‘ greatest strength is found in these lyrical, golden-hour-bathed images of the two girls simply wasting away the daylight hours together, whether in the clearings between towering Pacific Northwest trees, or in a bedroom, or along destitute train tracks and backroads on their bikes; when they flirt, tease, exchange tears, kiss fully, or partially, or not quite at all; when Coley tells Sonya to show her a “competitive dance” and instead of paying attention to the dance, she can’t help but linger on Sonya’s limbs and facial nuances as they flow through threads of sunlight from her bedroom window. Kiyoko’s film is lyrical in shot composition, in imagery, and, quite literally, in how big a role music plays in scoring each of these moments. This is where the film prevails, which makes sense — it’s directed by a musician, after all.
There’s one moment early in Sonya and Coley’s relationship where, after finishing her competitive dance for Coley, Sonya changes her mood abruptly and rushes to the bathroom, seemingly sick. Coley is so enamored and caught in the thrall of discovery that she continues perusing the artifacts in Sonya’s bedroom: her medals, her photos and ephemera lining the walls, other tchotchkes. Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” plays over these images, all-encompassing in its reverberating passion. All the while, we as viewers are keenly aware of the clues Sonya’s been dropping about the pressure her mother places on her and her budding dance career. An eating disorder is clearly being implied, and there’s a far more complicated and interesting movie hiding within this fleeting sequence early into its runtime. Is it to the film’s detriment that it decides to move on and not really address this detail again?
Kiyoko doesn’t seem to mind leaving these insinuations as mere details — mysteries that perhaps could never be explored or revealed or reconciled within a single summer of passionate (and passionately messy) love. But some of these details are difficult to shake without further context. For instance, Coley’s “rebound” after a fight with Sonya arrives in the form of the local corner store clerk, an alt-stoner girl who’s a bit older than Coley. When they go back to this girl’s apartment, suspenseful, dread-inducing music scores the build-up. Coley then gets high, the alt-girl goes down on her, and we suddenly cut to the aftermath, a sobbing Coley going home and clearly upset from not having been able to orgasm.
This leaves us to consider the dilemma inherent to the film’s narrative construction: Sonya, afraid of the reality that she might be lesbian and constantly queer-baiting Coley to the point of tears, is treated sympathetically by the film, even up to the very last frame. But this side character, who works at the convenience store, despite seeming completely well-intentioned, is nevertheless framed as a ne’er-do-well who inflicts further emotional harm on Coley. There are a handful of slight but memorably misguided choices of this design, ones which trigger some alarms with regard to the intent of the film’s storytelling throughout, and which aren’t helped any by the often unsubtle dialogue on display.
Still, after recently watching the brutally bleak and nihilistic final (?) season of Euphoria, it’s deniably refreshing to see a coming-of-age story that basks in the uncertainty, the joy, the tenderness of young love. Girls Like Girls might ultimately just be sticking to a proven formula and massaging viewer sympathies a bit too forcefully, but it also executed that formula earnestly and with no small amount of stylistic skill. And hell, if you need further proof of the goodwill the film earns, Zach Braff is even tolerable as an aloof father — quite literally, that’s all he’s there for, unless his true motive is to guilt-trip you into buying a T-Mobile subscription while assuring you it’s okay to be yourself. Either way, you know something has gone right if you can pull off that small miracle, and Kiyoko offers plenty more here besides.
DIRECTOR: Hayley Kiyoko; CAST: Maya da Costa, Myra Molloy, Zach Braff, Levon Hawke; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: June 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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