Girls Like Girls
Directed by Hayley Kiyoko
Written by Hayley Kiyoko, Stefanie Scott and Chloe Okuno
Starring Maya da Costa, Myra Molloy and Zach Braff
Classification 14A; 95 mins
Opens in select theatres June 19
With her first feature film, singer-songwriter and actor Hayley Kiyoko delivers another chapter in her now decade-long Girls Like Girls story world.
For the uninitiated (or those under 40), the 2015 music video for Kiyoko’s song Girls Like Girls hit Tumblr like an atom bomb. Co-directed by the artist, it turned sun-drenched, restless, teenage suburbia into a touchstone of young, queer awakening, screaming the quiet part out loud for a generation of women and girls too often raised on the subtext necessitated by compulsory heterosexuality.
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In the video, Coley, a quiet outsider, clocks Sonya, the girlfriend of an unimpressive and controlling guy. What starts as lingering eye contact develops into something undeniable, ultimately forcing a nasty confrontation between the three teenagers over what’s been building between the girls. It’s messy, slightly triumphant and has become canon for young lesbians and sapphics.
Kiyoko later turned the idea into the 2023 bestselling novel of the same name.
Needless to say, Girls Like Girls the feature arrives like an offering to the devoted – that is, the extremely online cohort who have treated Kiyoko less like a pop star and more like a patron saint of young lesbian yearning. For this audience, the film is less an adaptation and more an expansion of a sacred text.
Myra Molloy stars as Sonya and Maya Da Costa as Coley in Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls like Girls, exploring the mess of queer adolescence.Courtesy of Focus Features/Supplied
Kiyoko and her writing team begin by giving Coley (Maya da Costa) more of a backstory. A year after the death of her mother, the high schooler moves to a new town to live with her estranged father. There, she meets the bubbly and magnetic Sonya (Myra Molloy), whose curiosity and clear romantic interest in Coley lives alongside her own self-doubt and self-consciousness.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Girls Like Girls is the relocation of its story world to the late 2000s. The characters are irrevocably shaped by being the first generation to have their closest relationships mediated and coded through the internet.
The film trades in a specific kind of memory: sun-bleached summer afternoons in suburbia, the kernels of digital-age isolation and the quiet suffocation of being young and closeted in an environment that has no language or space for you. Here, in a time before mainstream acceptance, small-town queer desire feels riskier and less legible.
Anxious, heart-thumping chats happen over AOL, Canadian pop group Tegan and Sara’s 2004 album So Jealous plays on Coley’s iPod Nano, and Sonya leaves messages from her straight situationship on read on her Nokia Sidekick. It’s a somewhat effective, nostalgic nod toward a cultural moment that was incredibly formative for those of us whose teenage gay awakenings were shaped by queer-drenched indie pop and hearing our family computers chime when our crush logged on to instant messenger.
Kiyoko also makes good use of delineating those in-between spaces so favoured by teenagers on the brink of both self-discovery and adulthood. Parking lots, corner stores and off-the-beaten-path railway tracks are the venues within which Coley, Sonya and their peers navigate their intersecting relationships and desires alongside requisite underage drinking and apple-bong smoking.
Set in the late 2000s, the characters are irrevocably shaped by being the first generation to have their closest relationships mediated and coded through the internet.Courtesy of Focus Features/Supplied
The question for Girls Like Girls is can it sustain its pre-existing story for a feature-length run time? Unfortunately, the promise of finally seeing these characters expanded into something bigger often falls flat, relying heavily on nostalgia and emotional familiarity instead of developing the required narrative depth.
Aesthetically, the film remains committed to its music video origins. Soft lighting, lingering close-ups and a dream-like, soft-focus haze dominate nearly every frame. (Picture the sun-blown cinematography that dominated 2010s coming-of-age films.) While this creates a cohesive visual mood, it also contributes to a lack of emotional texture, especially in moments that call for greater tension or contrast.
Similarly, Coley’s journey – her grief, forced relocation and growing attraction to Sonya – unfolds in all-too-broad emotional strokes. While Kiyoko clearly intends to centre interiority over external action, the simplistic narrative leaves the film and its characters feeling underwritten.
While the film will no doubt be an instant classic for young sapphics, it unfortunately never deepens into something fully realized.Courtesy of Focus Features/Supplied
The film succeeds at capturing the volatility of queer teenage desire with fleeting moments of genuine precision, but there are crucial aspects that don’t feel fully explored, such as Sonya’s emotional volatility. She’s reduced to acting as a catalyst for Coley’s growth rather than being fully realized in her own right.
While there’s something admirable about Girls Like Girls and its refusal to tidy up the mess of queer adolescence (the film will no doubt be an instant classic for young sapphics), it unfortunately never deepens into something fully realized. It only gestures toward the feeling and atmosphere of emotional complexity, rather than materializing its substance in full.