ESPITE being set in the late 1970s, “20th Century Women” feels like the perfect movie for this moment. Writer/director Mike Mills sets one montage to Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, in which the president reflects on “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” I mean, come on.
But Mills is generally working in more universal themes, his alternating-character narration often phrased as if explaining humanity to an alien: This is an elephant. This is dancing. As in his previous film, “Beginners,” he tackles the question of how to be a decent person, doing it with generosity and humor. There aren’t any bad guys, only people trying to figure it all out.
Here, it’s Dorothea (Annette Bening), a single mother in Santa Barbara, Calif., who is doing the figuring for herself and for her teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). Their extended family consists of two boarders in their rambling house, the punk-rocker photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and the hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup), plus Jamie’s platonic best friend Julie (Elle Fanning). Dorothea enlists Abbie and Julie to help Jamie become a good man — whatever they decide that means.
Bening, who works sparingly enough to make us really appreciate her when she’s around, has never been better as the chain-smoking, Birkenstock-clad Dorothea, an old-school feminist slightly bemused by the sexual revolution and apprehensive about what’s next. Her frugality and blunt talk is eye-rolled at by her son: “She’s from the Depression,” he sighs. Gerwig, in a short scarlet hairdo, breaks through her screwball-pixie typecasting to play a woman dealing with the aftermath of cervical cancer. She takes the job of mentoring seriously, teaching Jamie to navigate mosh pits and read radical feminist literature. (In one of the funniest scenes, he gets in a fistfight over the politics of orgasm.)
The men in “20th Century Women” are equally important. Crudup shines when playing characters slightly at sea, and here he’s a gentle, sexy presence, making himself available for trysts and quasifatherly advice (“Never have sex with just the vagina. You have to have sex with the whole woman,” he imparts to Jamie.) Zumann, the receptacle for this boho wisdom, plays the role with a terrific blend of vulnerability and budding confidence.
Mills seems on his way to becoming an auteur powerhouse like Wes Anderson, if less of a perfectionist. He writes dialogue that doesn’t exactly sound like dialogue, lines that often tumble over one another the way they do in reality. And these are definitely all people I’d love to know in real life.