Dude (2018)

Olivia Milch's Dude arrives as a modest Netflix coming-of-age picture about four young women navigating the final two weeks of high school, and it conducts itself with a restraint that has grown rare. The camera stays on female friendship, grief, and the small tyrannies of graduation planning. Milch, making her directorial debut from a script that once sat on the Black List, builds the entire enterprise around the inner lives of these four characters. Their problems belong to them. Nobody turns to the audience to explain why any of it matters.

The ensemble is notably multiracial, with Alexandra Shipp and Awkwafina in supporting turns, and the film treats that fact as unremarkable, which is its own quiet achievement. Race never becomes a subject of conversation. Neither does the economic order, nor the climate, nor the body. A rape late in the second act receives appropriate gravity, and the film declines to convert it into a sermon. The result is a work of progressive instinct that never announces itself as such, which is either admirable discipline or a missed opportunity for a thesis, depending on your appetite for the latter.

The picture is slight. It drifts, it repeats itself, and it resolves its conflicts with the tidiness of a group project submitted on time. Yet there is something disarming about a film this content to let four women simply exist inside a story with no manifesto attached. The cultural markers live in the casting and the perspective, not in the dialogue. For a viewer keeping score, that restraint registers as a kind of integrity. For everyone else, it is a decent little movie about saying goodbye.