Hit songs come and go. Except of course for Hayley Kiyoko’s 2015 queer electropop anthem “Girls Like Girls,” which keeps rising like the phoenix.
The song is about a girl who steals a dude’s girlfriend and throws it back in his face. (Perfect, no notes.) It was released with a viral music video, directed by Kiyoko, about two teenagers in love and the abusive boyfriend who catches them almost kissing. He violently assaults them but then gets the bloody crap kicked out of him. Then they make out over his battered body. (Perfect, no notes.)
In 2023, Hayley Kiyoko wrote a best-selling young adult novel expanding on that story. Now, three years later, she’s directed and co-written a movie based on her novel, which was based on her music video, which was based on her song. I don’t know what comes next for “Girls Like Girls” — maybe an augmented reality experience or a tabletop RPG — but I suspect Kiyoko has a real future in filmmaking. “Girls Like Girls” is a memorable coming-of-age story, at times beautifully realized and occasionally a little undercooked.
Maya da Costa makes her big screen debut as Coley, a high schooler who moves to a small town at the beginning of summer. She attracts the attention of a small, popular cabal, led by Sonya (Myra Molloy, “He’s All That”) and her boyfriend Trenton (Levon Hawke). Coley is an introvert mourning the recent death of her mother. Sonya is an extroverted alcoholic who flirts with Coley but runs hot and cold. Trent is a possessive, sexist, homophobic, bullying sack of turds. Thank God we don’t spend much time with Trent.
Coley and Sonya have a beautiful, brief teen romance and Hayley Kiyoko lets their feelings flourish. As a filmmaker, she has an impressive eye for detail. Every scene is in a specific place, never a nebulous zone. You can feel the furniture, hear the air conditioning, sense the distance. It’s an absorbing, immediate approach to filmmaking, the kind that’s often weaponized in nostalgic cinema but too rarely employed in other contexts. “Girls Like Girls” takes place in the late 2000s and the lightly cushioned mechanical clicks of Coley’s keyboard, and the alarming yet comforting bloops of AIM Instant Messenger, teleports you right back to that era.
But things are going a little too well, a little too quickly, so we shouldn’t get comfortable. Sonya doesn’t just send mixed signals, she messes up Coley’s life. Now she’s spiraling in small town America, with no community and only a hapless dad who wasn’t in her life for the first decade and a half. Zach Braff plays Coley’s father. He’s contrite and subdued. He knows he screwed up for years and he knows Coley needs space, and he has no idea how to make anything better. At all.
Kiyoko wrote the screenplay with her “Jem and the Holograms” co-star Stefanie Scott, who also starred in the music video. (You could make a joke here about something good finally coming from the live-action “Jem and the Holograms,” but I like that movie, so look elsewhere if you want a film critic to validate your scorn.) It’s an admirably restrained script, free from heavy-handed melodrama, but not all the characters have interiority.
Coley is a complex protagonist, but Sonya is a bit of a dramatic trap. Her insecurity about her sexual identity makes her inscrutable and, understandably, unconvincing in the way she presents herself. But “unconvincing” is a tough note to play, and Myra Molloy doesn’t always convey the subtle truths that could bely Sonya’s façade. There are moments where Molloy and da Costa are in sync, and those are the best scenes of all, but there are also scenes where it’s hard to tell if Coley is maturing faster than Sonya or if da Costa simply has more control over her craft.
And then, of course, there’s the boys. This movie isn’t about them, fair enough, but they take up space and it’s worth noting how they fill the room. Every line spoken by a teenaged boy in “Girls Like Girls” is cringe personified, especially when it’s spoken by Trent. (God, how we hate Trent.) Zach Braff has a more sympathetic role, and proves there are decent straight men out there, but only if they’re good listeners who respect your agency. I’m not going to argue with that. It’s tempting to say Braff is fantastic, and in some ways he is, but his part was intentionally designed to meet our collective approval. We’ll like who he’s playing whether he plays it well or not, but he does, so good for him.
“Girls Like Girls” looks, on the surface, like an old-fashioned teen romance. It’s not. It’s a coming-of-age drama about a romance that goes wrong. It would be nice if Kiyoko’s film was simply nice, and nothing bad happened, but she has no interest in escapist fantasy. Kiyoko gradually scrapes away all the film’s early feelings of enchantment and discovery until all we have left is self-analysis and slow, steady, personal growth. Coley thinks she loves Sonya but Sonya can’t even use real words to convey her feelings. She says “olive juice” instead of “I love you,” which renders a mature emotion childish. And by the end of their initial relationship, she’s picked open all of Coley’s wounds, which had barely closed to begin with.
Kiyoko’s film concludes shortly before the end of the music video, perhaps to imply that this story will go in the same direction. I’m not convinced. These are young people with very different psychological needs, and they’re already growing apart. Sonya probably isn’t the love of Coley’s life. She’s probably an allegory for Coley’s troubled relationship with her mentally unstable mother, who also made her feel unsteady, both loved and unlovable.
That’s not a great love story, but in some ways it’s a great story, if you’re exclusively concerned about Coley. Sonya represents something real, and hopefully she’ll grow up, but until she does, we have to leave these two teenagers where they are: in the middle of their journey, in the middle of their personal development and in the middle of a sweet, flawed, but impressive film from a promising new director.
