20th Century Women (2016)

Mike Mills returns to the territory of his own upbringing with a 1979 Santa Barbara household in which a 55-year-old single mother, Dorothea, recruits a cancer-surviving punk photographer and a restless teenage neighbor to help raise her adolescent son. The arrangement is unusual, the execution is gentle, and the film's true subject is the women themselves: their marriages, their illnesses, their ambivalence about children, their private definitions of a life well spent. Mills has called it a love letter to the women who raised him, and the sincerity of that gesture is legible in every frame. This is a film organized around feminine interiority, and it does not apologize for the fact.

The social consciousness here is explicit and specific. Abbie hands Jamie books on feminism. A dinner party turns into a small insurrection when she forces the table to say the word menstruation aloud. Dorothea's authority as a mother is examined, defended, and finally honored. The convictions are real, and they are spoken. The film declines to extend that consciousness outward. The cast is white, the neighborhood is white, and race is simply not a subject. There is no queer thread, no economic argument beneath the punk costuming, no environmental concern, no reckoning with how bodies are judged beyond the medical facts of cervical cancer and the fertility drug DES. The punk is a wardrobe and a soundtrack, not a politics.

The result is a period piece with a strong point of view and a light touch. Its sermonizing is intermittent and always in service of character. We are left with a warm, unhurried elegy for a particular kind of 1970s progressive household, one that believed in self-examination and assumed the examining would be done by white people in California.