In 1979, Santa Barbra, Dorothea is bringing up her son Jamie. He's hit 15 and Dorothea is concerned she can't relate to him and his generation any more. So she asks other people in her life - her two lodgers, Abbe and William, plus Julie, a girl from the neighborhood who occasionally stays over, to help bring him up and to help him through life.
This seems like a simple enough premise - but it's in the execution that this really sores. Mike Mills' script allows each of the characters to be filled out beyond the confines of the period displayed - we get voiceovers and montages that give everyone a cultural context that they come from and a destination their life is leading them, and we get to celebrate the moment they are in now. And the peculiarities of 1979 Los Angeles life are particularly observed - the music scene where punk and art-pop were starting to face off, the wider world (Jimmy Carter's presidency features with a key speech that feels alarmingly prescient, nearly 40 years later), And we get a sense of the three very different women who are raising Jamie - Dorathea played by Annette Benning as a loving woman slightly adrift in her space, Abbe played by Greta Gerwig as a looser spirit slightly rebelling against Dorathea, and Elle Fanning as Julie, just that crucial couple of years older than Jamie which makes her simultaneously tempting and distant.
It's an extrordinary film that lets us into a set of lives in a time and place that feels simultanously very familiar and very far away, where a lot of the foundational fractures in our culture are starting to set in, about sex, society and humanity. It's personal and it's political and it's incredibly intriguing. Absolutely worth watching.
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