Stargirl (2020)

Stargirl arrives from the Disney+ pipeline as a jukebox musical romance adapted from Jerry Spinelli's 2000 young adult novel, and it conducts itself with the earnest manners of a school assembly. Julia Hart directs with a soft hand. Grace VanderWaal plays the title character as a ukulele-toting free spirit who serenades a losing football team and coaxes a shy narrator out of his shell. The film wants us to feel something about individuality, and it largely succeeds, in the way a warm bath succeeds.

For our purposes, the cultural ledger is thin. The supporting cast includes Karan Brar and Giancarlo Esposito, which supplies a measure of diversity the film never comments on. A female director and a female lead lend a mild progressive tint, though the story is told through a boy's voiceover and concerns personality, not politics. The nonconformity on display involves odd clothes and a pet rat, not bodies, brains, or economic systems. There is no same-sex romance, no climate anxiety, no critique of wealth, no rewriting of history. The sermon is gentle: be yourself, and let others do the same. It is delivered with a song, not a raised finger.

What remains is nostalgia, a decent soundtrack, and the observation that high school is hard. We have seen this film many times under many titles, and we will see it again. It is harmless and sweet, and it carries almost none of the cultural signifiers that would lift it into the upper register of contemporary social consciousness. The sommelier notes a faint floral finish, a soft body, and no lingering aftertaste of ideology. The glass is set down.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}