Three Girls

What does it take to make a genuinely brilliant movie about adolescence? Simply this: a commitment to almost unbearable honesty on the director's part, and a visceral understanding of those truths from his cast.

In his debut feature, Girls Town, Jim McKay was unable to reach the intense level of candor that teenage girls, in particular, demand. His rather heavy-handed script, about three best friends navigating high school, was content to make parables out of their lives. And his twentysomething cast, led by a posturing Lili Taylor, was simply unable to crack the code of a language clearly beyond its reach.

It seems likely that McKay had some of his own doubts about the movie, since he's very nearly remade it with Our Song. Like Girls Town, Our Song tells the story of three overwhelmed friends living in New York City projects (this time, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn). But though the stories are similar, the outcome couldn't be more different.

The opening credits assert that the film was made not just by McKay, but by his entire cast. It's a generous, but entirely apt, declaration. Our Song was the first feature film for each of McKay's leading actresses, and all three deliver such stunningly natural performances, it's a bit of a shock to discover that they're all professional performers. McKay also integrated much of the neighborhood into the film, including the actual Jackie Robinson Steppers, a vibrant local marching band to which his characters belong.

The movie begins during a slow August, when the girls -- Lanisha (Kerry Washington), Joycelyn (Anna Simpson), and Maria (Melissa Martinez) -- have little to do but think about how little they have to do. Suffocated by their lack of options and confounded by the idea of creating new ones, they gossip outside their cramped apartments, go to parties, and jostle with their overworked parents. Slowly, however, each one finds herself forced to make major decisions about her future.

Maria has the biggest choice to make, when she discovers she's pregnant from a one-night stand. Rather bravely, though, McKay keeps all the girls on an equal level; after spending nearly a year researching the movie, he obviously learned that any decision has the potential to be earth-shattering when you're sixteen. So for Joycelyn, choosing between her old friends and a more sophisticated new crowd is hugely consequential. And Lanisha, the sensitive mother hen of the trio, has to learn from her friends' mistakes without making too many of her own.

But the focus of the film really isn't on what happens to the girls; it's simply on the girls themselves. Somehow, McKay has grasped the essence of that shimmery moment when time moves impossibly slow, and yet every day brings a life-altering event. Extraordinarily -- even shockingly -- respectful of its subjects, Our Song is the most faithful cinematic depiction of adolescence in recent memory.