Direction: Josephine Decker
Country: USA
Josephine Decker’s moody adaptation of The Sky is Everywhere, the young adult novel by Sandy Nelson, who also wrote the screenplay, is held back by a total lack of chemistry between the protagonists and a notorious mismanagement of the natural flow of things. It’s all neatly filmed with vivid colors, the mise-en-scene is a joy, and there’s a lot of style on show, but the sequences feel stilted while the substance becomes thinner as the film moves along.
This coming-of-age tale places Lennie (Grace Kaufman) at its center. She is a 17-year-old high school student with an exceptional talent for music, who gets caught at a dramatic crossroads between grief - created by the sudden death of her close sister - and the excitement of the first love. While going through a phase of emotional disorientation, she must make a firm decision about who she wants to be with: her late sister’s depressive boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander), or a cheerful new colleague, Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon), who sends her to the clouds.
Emotionally strong topics like these deserve more affecting outcomes. Unfortunately, all traces of cleverness from Decker's previous films - Madeline's Madeline (2018) and Shirley (2020) - have been scrubbed away in favor of a serviceable slickness. They say love can move mountains, but this one here is too inconsistent to prove it.
