Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List (2015)

The film arrives with a pedigree of a specific and modest kind: adapted from the 2007 young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, directed by Kristin Hanggi, premiered at the Outfest LGBT Film Festival in July 2015, then slipped quietly to video on demand. Naomi and Ely are neighbors in a New York apartment building, lifelong best friends, keepers of a shared list of boys neither may kiss. The list collapses the moment Ely, who is gay, and Naomi, who is not, both develop feelings for the same young man. The premise is sturdy. The execution is a shrug.

Queerness here is not decoration. It is the load-bearing wall. Ely's identity generates the hookups, the betrayal, the reconciliation, and a bisexual character who materializes in the back half to complicate the geometry further. The film treats all of this as ordinary weather, which is either admirable or simply the price of adapting a book that already worked this way. A mixed-race supporting cast drifts through without anyone demanding an explanation, and race itself is never raised, an absence rather than a virtue.

The final voiceover steps forward to explain that love assumes many forms and that every person may deserve more than one special person. Soft sermonizing, delivered kindly. Around it: a woman at the helm, a heroine with desires of her own, a mother rebuilding after a husband's affair. The resolution, though, is romantic attachment, plainly. No environmental anxiety, no economic complaint, no body politics, no neurodivergence, no history requiring revision. A small, pleasant artifact of the mid-2010s young adult boom, and content to remain one.