‘Girls Like Girls’ Review: Let’s Go, Lesbians, Let’s Go [C+]

Every queer person understands the pains of teenage yearning. In those formative years, who didn’t fall deep into the throes of an all-consuming crush? Who didn’t wake up too early to get ready in the morning hoping for a look or a brush a few hours down the line? Even though these are incredibly common in our day-to-day life, the experience of queer youth isn’t often seen in studio films, especially lesbians’ stories. Hayley Kiyoko, the internet’s “Lesbian Jesus,” has made a film to counteract that reality with Girls Like Girls. The pop star’s directorial debut adapts her 2023 novel, which was adapted from her 2015 song, and tracks the simmering tensions and anxieties of young lesbian love in all its turmoil, while unfortunately being a little too turbulent itself to fully land. 

Set in the mid-aughts, Girls Like Girls follows Coley (Maya da Costa), a shy teen lesbian whose recent loss of her mother has left her adrift and stuck with her father (Zach Braff) who she never got to know. Soon, she develops a crush on and befriends Sonya (Myra Molloy), a popular girl with a boyfriend, Trenton (Levon Hawke). As the girls’ friendship teeters on becoming something more, external pressures threaten to derail what could be the start of a beautiful relationship. 

Kiyoko’s music has always excelled at charting the high highs and low lows of queer yearning, tracking the pains of wanting someone so badly you could explode. Her pop anthems soar to the clouds and her ballads reach down to the depths. They’re what earned her the “Lesbian Jesus” moniker across platforms like Tumblr in the 2010s. “Girls Like Girls,” the song, is one of her discography’s highlights with a propulsive chorus sandwiched between raw, confessional musings. In its best moments, this adaptation reaches those ecstatic heights of youth through the hazy atmosphere Kiyoko conjures in brief moments of connection, achieved in stolen glances and caught breaths. They’re lovely moments captured between a more rote coming-of-age structure that never bursts beyond convention. 

Archetypes are comforts of convenience for writers and the structure of Girls Like Girls feels so familiar because it often relies on the audience’s knowledge of how these things are supposed to go, and that assumed cultural understanding of Sundance hodgepodge emotions stands in the place of real development of these characters. This isn’t to say they don’t feel like real characters, they do, and that’s a testament of Kiyoko’s background as a visionary on her music videos and to her cast. There’s an obviously personal tie to the film for Kiyoko and it’s found in those little details. Between da Costa and Molloy, they both capture the bumbling awkwardness of teenagedom pretty well, but more importantly, they portray that painful feeling of not being allowed to be who you think you might be, and not being given the space to explore it in the first place.

Taking place in a small Oregon town, the lush natural environments, sprawling backroads, and isolated storefronts all make for an atmosphere that feels oppressively small yet freeing. Coley’s sheepish nature really comes to the fore when roaming about with Sonya across these locale-specific terrains, where the latter’s more jubilant energy acts as a sweet foil. There’s a secondhand embarrassment that comes from their early scenes and that’s what immediately sells their chemistry: da Costa and Molloy tap into an open-hearted yet reserved teenage pining that fills the spaces their environs leave wide open. When Kiyoko is capturing the honeymoon phase of their friendship, their lingering stares and giggling fits, often soundtracked to original songs from Kiyoko, the film electrically captures youthful longing especially in its sugar rush of an emotional acknowledgement: “Olive juice” as a stand in for “I love you.” Who hasn’t been young and dumb?

Coley in particular can barely express herself how she wants, but can’t stop herself from transmitting her every feeling on her face and through her body, opposed to the much more poised and collected Sonya, whose relationship with the cavalier and dismissive Trenton floats above their burgeoning friendship like a bro-ey question mark. Kiyoko uses that latter relationship to explore the pitfalls of compulsive heterosexuality, or comphet, but Trenton mostly feels like an unnecessary roadblock to development, especially as the film eschews the music video’s more explosive ending. 

These two girls’ paths are clearly meant for each other, which is why the brief music video works so well and has held such a cultural stronghold on queer psyches for 11 years, but this is also why the film feels like it’s too often spinning in circles. Between Coley and Sonya’s painfully slow PC instant messaging that fails to elicit the longing it aims for and a cavalcade of montages of their relationship which diminish in power with each successive one, even with a 95 minute runtime, Girls Like Girls still hosts a healthy amount of dead air. Worst of all, the inevitable conflict, a misunderstanding surrounding the disclosure of information about Coley’s mother’s passing, feels like an obligatory screenwriting signpost. In the back half of the film, the heightened dramas between Coley and Sonya, along with Coley and her father, drag the movie to a halt. It’s reminiscent of CODA in ways, in its charming opening that screeches to a halt when the script begins to necessitate heavier melodrama than the foundation of the film can support. Now, a best picture winner isn’t the worst company to keep, but there’s a strategy of playing beats too safe while simultaneously reaching too high that defines both films, for better and worse. 

Where Girls Like Girls stumbles is in its loftier emotional goals. It can’t reach the true heart-wrenching drama it seeks to extract from Coley’s familial tragedy nor her pain with the middle chapter of this relationship. Yet, there’s a real sweetness to the movie that acts as a summer balm. Kiyoko’s eye for the little beauties in moments of these young lesbians’ summer love shine and will make for a charming time at the movies with groups of friends or with that person you kept brushing past in the hallways at school who you should text and ask out already. Most importantly, this is an unapologetically gay romance, a teen movie about two lesbians figuring themselves out, being released in hundreds of screens during the summer. This will undoubtedly change some queer kids’ lives, just to see themselves represented on-screen without conditions or clauses. Kiyoko’s made something personal. Its highs are high, its lows are low, just like the growing pains she sings about, and it’s a calling card for an artist still growing in the world. 

Grade: C+

Girls Like Girls is currently in theaters from Focus Features.

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August Hammel

August Hammel is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University’s journalism program and has written reviews and conducted interviews for AwardsWatch. He was born in San Diego and lives in San Francisco. When not writing, he can be found in a theater as he searches for what he wants to write about next and why. August can be reached at his email augusthammel@gmail.com.

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