Review: GOOD ONE

 by Rob DiCristino

“Can’t we just have a nice day?”

As is the case with their real life counterparts, our favorite fictional characters “come of age” in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons. Sometimes, it’s by making great strides with their peers — the big dance, the big game, the big kiss, and all that. In those instances, they undergo a cathartic change that opens up new possibilities and usually provokes a happy ending: Barriers are broken. Insecurities are overcome. Promises are kept. Our hero’s growth is positive and powerful, leaving them better equipped to face the challenges of the next phase. Other times, characters undergo much darker, more difficult, and more painful forms of maturation. Values are compromised. Secrets are uncovered. Wounds are inflicted. We all have our scars, of course, and calluses are evidence of hard-won experience, but these changes are different. They’re subtractive. Poisonous. They hollow us out and make us reconsider what we thought we knew about the world around us. India Donaldson’s Good One is in that second camp, a tense and understated portrait of shattering revelation.

Seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias, a name you’ll want to write down) futzes with her phone in the backseat of her dad’s (James Le Gros as Chris) car as it leaves New York City on the way to the Catskills. Up front, Chris and his best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) discuss their respective divorces and lament the absence of Matt’s son, who was supposed to be joining them on their weekend hike before coming down with a bout of general teenage malaise. Matt’s a classic lower-case-u ”uncle,” that friend of your parents who knows you better than your real relations ever will, and he can’t help probing Sam for an explanation. It’s the first of many adult burdens that Donaldson — writing and directing her feature debut — will thrust upon Sam, who’s mature enough to provide decent insight but still too young to appreciate the emotional complexities of marriage and parenthood. Sam’s flippant exegesis comes with an eye-roll — because teenager — and a sinking suspicion that these two would-be role models are actually infantile brutes in need of constant supervision.

Neither of them does much to beat those allegations as the weekend progresses, with manchild Matt failing to appropriately prepare for the trip — forgetting his tent in the car and cutting a pair of jeans into jagged shorts — and choleric Chris dodging the lion’s share of responsibility for his marriage’s collapse (“I just couldn’t make your mother happy,” he tells the bottom of his flask). Sam observes this Midlife Crisis on Infinite Earths with a mix of detachment and frustration, an uncomfortable awareness that she’ll receive absolutely no parental guidance when it comes to her own problems, which currently include her period — cinematographer Wilson Cameron nails the awkwardness of tampon change-outs on more than one occasion — freshman year of college, and her growing attraction to her best friend, Jessie (Sumaya Bouhbal). Instead, she’ll toil at the edge of civilization, mediating spats between these two hetero life mates and playing the role — see the title — that, as anyone from a broken home can tell you, she’s been playing for most of her young adult life.

And then something happens, something I’m not going to spoil for you and, in all honesty, something you just might blink and miss. It’s not violent. It’s not graphic. Nothing explodes, and no one commits suicide. There’s simply a shift in the group’s power dynamic, a quick moment of vulnerability in which Sam bears witness to the true weakness haunting these men, a moment in which she finally understands just how alone she actually is. That moment — and the climactic exchange it provokes — strands Sam in the figurative woods as well as the literal. It’s an existential threat far greater than an absent-minded uncle or emotionally-stunted father. It’s a test of her fortitude, her self-respect. It’s a chance to prove that even ironic teenage aloofness has a breaking point. More than anything else, it’s a soul-crushing example of why being “the good one” will not protect her forever, that no scholarship, trophy, or perfectly-seasoned soup will ever be enough to cover up the streaks and blotches in her family portrait. From now on, Sam realizes, she will have to paint her own.

All this may make Good One sound like just another treacly Sundance darling, but its chief weapon is not its grandeur but its nuance: Its ninety minutes are mostly spent in quiet observation, pulling just enough focus on the rustic environment to set a metaphor without ever feeling like a graduate thesis. Unlike many young actors, greenhorns taught to wear their emotions on their faces, Lily Collias carries Sam’s indignation squarely and confidently on her back, deploying shifts in posture and expression only when they’re liable to do the most damage to her sympathetic audience. It’s a stunning performance unmatched until a final moment when her scene partner — any more detail would give it away — delivers more with a flicker of his eyes than most could pull off with reams of flamboyant soliloquy. Whether or not Good One’s lack of strict narrative scaffolding undercuts some of emotional heft will depend on the age, experience, and in all likelihood, gender, of the viewer, but the film remains a remarkable debut for India Donaldson and a powerful new twist on the “coming of age” genre.

Good One is in select theaters now.