GIRLS LIKE GIRLS Review

Hayley Kiyoko has spent eleven years being called Lesbian Jesus by a generation of women who found themselves in a four minute music video, and Girls Like Girls the feature film is, more than anything, an act of devotion to those people. It is a love letter to a fandom rather than a fully realized film, and once you understand that, almost everything about it makes sense.

The bones of the original video are all here. Sun soaked Oregon, a yellow bike with butterfly handles, shimmering pools, the agonized glances across fields of grass that fueled a thousand desperate AIM away messages back in the day. Coley, played by Maya da Costa with a quiet expressive gravity that does most of its heaviest lifting in silence, moves in with her estranged dad and immediately falls for the magnetic, emotionally unavailable Sonya. You know this story even if you have never seen the music video, because it is the one queer women have been telling each other in whispers for decades. The needle drops, stretching from Imogen Heap to Tegan and Sarah, build a genuinely lovely sense of place, somewhere between The O.C. and the gentler edges of The Virgin Suicides.

The problem, and it is a real one, is that Sonya never quite earns the devastation Coley feels for her. Myra Molloy is not the issue here, the script simply does not give the relationship enough heat to justify the amount of heartbreak it demands from its audience. For long stretches I found myself disengaging from the central romance entirely and instead wondering, with real sincerity, how exactly Zach Braff's career path led him from Scrubs to handcrafting turquoise jewelry in a film about teenage lesbian yearning. That is not nothing. That is a journey.

What genuinely works is everything happening at the edges. Coley's relationship with her father, messy and underexplored as it sometimes is, taps into something true about shame and self acceptance that lands harder than the central will they won't they ever manages. And the film's best scene, an explosive, finally honest confrontation between the two girls, suggests a sharper, braver movie that occasionally peeks through the nostalgia haze before retreating back into it.

This is not a film built for skeptics. It is built for the women who watched that video a hundred times in 2015 and felt, for the first time, completely seen. Afterwards, the people around me in the lobby, holding each other and talking it through, were clearly moved by the experience. I left the theatre unmoved.

Sometimes a film does not need to convert anyone. It just needs to come home to the people who were already waiting for it.

🍿 SCORE = 67/100