high-school-graduation

A VHS staple, seen a hundred times. I first watched it as a teenager, around the time I was getting into the Clash; given how much of my taste Lloyd Dobler and Martin Blank went on to shape, I’m amazed I never started kickboxing.

I’ve rewatched a bunch of John Cusack films this summer and the running thread has been something like moral compromise. That doesn’t work here. Lloyd has no angle and nothing to trade. It belongs to James Court instead, secretly up to no good and justifying it in a terrible, burdensome way. John Mahoney never lets him stop believing his excuse, right through the prison visit. I miss him a lot. Such a talented actor.

Ione Skye is good, though this is Lloyd’s film. Romantic without ever tipping into sentimentality. The boombox got the glory and the memes but the last scene is the best in the film. The pair of them, future undecided, waiting to take off.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.