Janet Planet review – mother-daughter relationship unfolds in dreamy summer haze

The dramatist Annie Baker won a Pulitzer for her stage play The Flick, about listless, bored ushers in an empty cinema auditorium between screenings; now she makes her feature debut, writing and directing a very personal movie about an 11-year-old girl spending a fraught summer with her mum in her rural Massachusetts home in the summer of 1991. The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

The performances are strong, but the writing is such that the characters’ passions, fears and grievances are in some way veiled; yet there is subtlety and indirectness in this. Julianne Nicholson is very good as single-mum Janet, who has recently completed her training as an acupuncturist and now has a practice funkily branded “Janet Planet”; her daughter Lacy (good stuff from the newcomer Zoe Ziegler) hates summer camp and makes a plaintive payphone call to come home so she can moon about the house all summer long.

Lacy becomes an intimate witness to her mother’s tricky boyfriends and friends, who enter and exit her life in loosely chapter-headed segments. Wayne (Will Patton) is prone to histrionic migraines, Regina (Sophie Okonedo) is an actor who may or may not be fully supportive to Janet’s needs, and Avi (Elias Koteas), the theatre troupe leader slash guru, is a bearded blowhard who winds up coming around to try to date Janet. As for Janet herself, she has an amusing scene where she confesses to the sardonically unimpressed Lacy that she’s always believed in her heart that could make any man she wanted fall in love with her – if she really chose to. Lacy, perhaps like the audience, can see this for the alibi that it is.

The film shows us that Lacy’s own relationship with her mother is flawed and compromised from the start; she loved hanging out at the mall with Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), Wayne’s child from a previous relationship, but now that friendship is in the bin, thanks to her hopeless mother’s anti-talent for dating and men. And so the film drifts and eddies its way to an unresolved-chord of an ending, a little emotionally reticent but always beautifully presented.

• Janet Planet is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 July, and is screening at the Melbourne international film festival in August.