The fans of the singer Hayley Kiyoko will recognize the yellow Schwinn that Coley (Maya da Costa) sails in on at the opening of “Girls Like Girls,” the pop-star-turned-director’s coming-of-age romance. It resembles the bike the central character rode at the start of Kiyoko’s 2015 music video for the hit song of the same name.
Indeed, this queer drama — starring da Costa and Myra Molloy as Sonya, the vivacious girl Coley falls for — has a touching provenance. After struggling with post-concussion syndrome, Kiyoko adapted her 2015 hit song and its viral music video into a Y.A. novel. (Published in 2023, it became a best seller.) Now the multi-hyphenate brings that love story to the big screen. Some of the verve of the music video, as well as the knowing observations that came from a book told in the first person, have been tempered. The film’s lead is more clearly wrestling with her feelings, struggling with doubts about the object of her affections at the same time she is dealing with the burden of parental loss.
After her mother’s death, 17-year-old Coley has been relocated from San Diego to semirural Oregon, where she lives in self-imposed near silence with the father she never knew. As summer gets underway, Coley eyes from afar a group of childhood friends who travel like a rambunctious pack from diners to pools to unchaperoned house parties to a forested watering hole. Rinse and repeat.
Sonya is the sun her friends orbit around. How could Coley not be drawn to her? Or as Sonya’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, Trenton (Levon Hawke), quips when Coley tentatively joins the group at a diner: “Sonya has a thing for strays.” But what Coley begins to feel for her new friend is more than that, and Sonya’s attention also seems pointed. But is it? With a wounded gaze and tentative hope, da Costa leans into her character’s neediness, a choice that may prove wincingly familiar to the been-there-done-that crowd.
Coley’s vulnerability is amplified by her budding sexuality but also by her deep grief. Like the boxes marked “Mom’s Stuff,” stacked in the new room, her mother’s death looms. There’s a lot for the teenager to unpack.
The titular song’s hook is “girls like girls, like boys do, nothing new,” and the movie’s “boys” are the increasingly possessive Trenton and the more thoughtful Alex (Alozie Larose). The actor Zach Braff brings a kind of benevolent wisdom as Coley’s estranged dad, Curtis. He may look like he’s out of his depth, but he’s good at waiting patiently to help this simmering, grieving stranger he’s now responsible for.
Kiyoko wrote the movie with Stefanie Scott (who starred in the music video), and the film’s girl power extends to its almost entirely female crew. The costume designer Kelli Dunsmore has rummaged the closets of the young and thriftily chic to create a credible dress code of frayed jean shorts, plaid shirts tied around waists and midriff tanks. While the friends’ clothes suggest a shared sensibility, their homes (production design by Lindsey Moran) speak subtly about their class distinctions.
On the way to Coley and Sonya figuring out what they mean to each other, there will be secrets kept and betrayed, and the pangs of misunderstandings and newfound pleasures that make the genre achy and appealing. There might even be a happy ending. Kiyoko didn’t come by her fan-given nickname, Lesbian Jesus, for nothing. Like Kiyoko’s videos, the movie wants to create space for romantic deliverance.
Girls Like Girls
Rated R for teen alcohol and drug use, and some language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
