The adaptation trajectory of “Girls Like Girls” is an unusual one. In 2015, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko released a wildly catchy song of the same name, bringing the phrase “girls like girls like boys do” into the viral mainstream. The accompanying video was a compact five-minute story about two teenage girls living in the suburbs who discover that their friendship is much more than that. The clip, co-directed by Singer, was expertly shot and empathetically conveyed, and garnered enough fan interest that Kiyoko eventually published a YA novel expanding on the adventures of young lovers Corey and Sonya. And now we have the movie “Girls on Girls.” A full ten years have passed since the song’s first release – years in pop parlance at the time – but its expression of queer self-discovery is no less refreshing and disarming.
You don’t need this background or knowledge of Kiyoko to enjoy the star’s summer feature directorial debut. The film tells an inescapably familiar story of first love, first heartbreak, and lessons learned with such frank emotional purity that it feels fresh all over again. Rather, it reminds you of a time when such feelings were new and overwhelming. As much as the supposedly older and wiser people didn’t tell you that. The film’s two fine young stars, Maya da Costa and Maira Molloy, deserve much of the praise for their gentle, approachable warmth, but so too, of course, does Kiyoko, who emerges here as a filmmaker of considerable skill and sensitivity, clearly capable of handling other projects not rooted in her own songbook.
Kiyoko and co-writers Chloe Okuno (The Watcher) and Stephanie Scott (coincidentally the lead actress in the original music video) chose an early 2000s setting that caters to millennial nostalgia (when separated, the characters communicate primarily via desktop IM messaging rather than text), but helps more pointedly illustrate just how much youth queer visibility has changed in recent decades. While “Girls Like Girls” will resonate with younger viewers who can’t imagine life without their smartphones, “Girls Like Girls” should resonate with older LGBTQ viewers who grew up feeling alone in their identity, without many vocal allies or allies, and without touchstones of cultural normalization like “Heartstoppers.”
But, unusually, it’s not primarily a coming out story. The 17-year-old protagonist, Cory (Da Costa), may be shy and insecure in many ways, but the fact that he has a crush on girls doesn’t make him insecure. She just quietly waits to fall in love with someone and accepts that it may take some time. As it turns out, she’s lonely, having just moved to a new town with a father (Zach Braff) she doesn’t know very well after the death of her mother. Summer unfolds before her eyes like a blank diary, and she rides her bike around the suburbs, basking in the magic-hour glow cast by cinematographer Sonya Tsypin’s gorgeous, hot, honey-soaked lenses all day, without actually enjoying it. A social savior in the form of Sonya (Molloy), a gregarious cool girl, takes a shine to Cory, whom she bumps into at a coffee shop, and invites him to join her clique.
Cory has little interest in Sonya’s superficial friends, and certainly not her rude, territorial semi-boyfriend Trenton (Levon Hawk), but the girls hit it off — and as they spend more time alone, the line between best friends’ intense love and romantic love quickly blurs. Kiyoko beautifully captures the charged rush of early desire, focusing on small, innocent gestures that feel shocking in the moment. The loan of a favorite jacket, the message drafted while standing still and then scrutinized as subtext, the boundary crossed when one knee tentatively touches the other in the backseat of a car. At one point, I went too far. Sonya may be preternaturally poised and grounded, but she’s still less accepting of her sexuality than her soon-to-be flamboyant girlfriend.
With this sense of tension and the ambiguity of whether or not the girls’ relationship will take place, the second half of “Girls Like Girls” is more anticipated and less seductive than the first half. The film started out, as many do, as a woozy, tanned mood piece somewhere between reckless possibility and melancholic stasis. But it’s still a moving and rewarding work, illuminated throughout by Da Costa’s superb performance, conveying the depth and seriousness of Corey’s emotions while forgiving the character’s spells of silliness and petulance.
She sometimes looks much younger than Sonya, sometimes more mature, but Molloy plays her with a charming, casually unstable energy of hot and cold. The film is enriched by the sharp, concrete sense of the two girls gazing at each other, sometimes passively, sometimes with unguarded fascination. Kiyoko’s unusually endearing teen film, alive with both soul connections and the bodily itch of these intimate, unruly, personally unknown emotions, matches the giddy, obsessive ecstasy of the song that inspired it. This song is a blissful new recording with a slow tempo that plays during the end credits. “We’ll be everything we need,” Kiyoko sings lightly. A dizzying line about the idealism of the First Clash is now being uttered by a 30-something who has lived to tell the story.
