20th Century Women

Just as he did in his Oscar-winning film

Beginners, director Mike Mills again explores the bond between parent and child. In this film, described as a 1970s cultural odyssey, the wonderful Annette Bening plays a gregarious, open-minded single mother, Dorothea.

Her child, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann from Netflix’s Sense8), is her teenage son. Dorothea isn’t quite sure she can guide him on his path to becoming a man.

Giving plenty of credence to women power, Dorothea recruits the help of two women to help raise Jamie. Her housemate, Abbie, is a photographer whose energy is fuelled by anger and the new-wave scene.

Julie, another friend of Dorothea and Jamie, played by Elle Fanning, is also conscripted into a version of parenthood. She’s oblivious to the fact that Jamie is in love with her.

Men aren’t excluded from Jamie’s life though. Billy Crudup plays a handyman who is also called on for guidance.

Mills’s film weaves social, cultural and political threads into a tapestry of late 1970s life in the US.