Lady Bird

It's probably a sign of my age that I don't see the set-in-2002 film "Lady Bird" as particularly a nostalgia piece (although the distance between then and now is less than the distance between the release of "American Graffiti" and when it was set) - instead, this feels like a contemporary story about a girl's last year of high school, as she tries to work out her ambitions, her feeling about boys and particularly her relationship with her mother. It's a reasonably gentle story - this isn't something where any great traumas are inflicted on anybody - but this has the general feel of how teenagehood felt to me - sometimes you're awful and sometimes your circumstances feel awful, and you get out of high school alive and only vaguely prepared for what comes next.

The centre is the relationship between Saroise Ronan and Laurie Metcalf as mother and daughter, in that weird middle ground where somehow you're just close enough to someone to be able to completely trigger all their worst instincts. Metcalf is one of those actresses who has very rarely got a big screen chance to shine, and shine she does here. It's absolutely balanced in between affection and frustration, and she gives so much by gesture and facial expression that the dialogue doesn't speak. Saroise Ronan plays Lady Bird on just the right side of insufferability - much of what she does should, objectively, be kinda awful, but somehow it comes through that it comes from inner need and vulnerability rather than ill intent.

There's a vast supporting cast, both solid stage actors and a couple of young-men-on-the-rise, all of whom contribute to filling out the portrait of a lower-middle class teenager. And this very much drew me in with its simple portrait of regular people in that phase of life where nothing's quite certain except that everything is going to change soon.