IS FIZZILY FUNNY

WISH I could live through something.” So sighs Christine McPherson, the spiky, moody, flawed and delightful protagonist of

Lady Bird. The movie takes its title from the name Christine has bestowed upon herself during her senior year at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, which she sniffily dubs “the Midwest of California”.

Everything’s terrible in

Lady Bird’s life right now: her educational prospects, her love life and especially her mother, whose daily doses of doubt, anxiety and engulfing unconditional love put Lady Bird in a fluster of headspinning mixed messages.

As a funny, poignant dramatisation of a year in the life of an American teenager, Lady Bird follows the usual comingof-age arc of missteps, regrets and amusing reckonings, but in the hands of Greta Gerwig – who makes her solo writing and directing debut – what might have been a by-the-numbers proposition turns out to be fizzily funny and utterly original and revelatory.

Gerwig became famous as an actress in films by such observant generational chroniclers as

Joe Swanberg and Noah Baumbach; it’s tempting to believe that she learned at the feet of the masters.

The insight and assurance of Lady Bird suggests that it was she lending wisdom and taste to her male colleagues all along.

Anyone who’s lived within the emotional cyclone known as adolescence will recognise the vertiginous highs and lows of Lady Bird, which follows our heroine – who affects pinkstreaked hair, thrift-chic clothes and an alternately sour and slightly tart demeanour – through a year that includes auditions for a musical, a romance with a sweet, gangly co-star (played by Lucas Hedges) and an ongoing battle royal with her mother (Laurie Metcalf) and father (Tracy Letts) regarding the family’s straitened finances and her own angst and ambitions.

Ronan, the Irish actress who delivered such a delicate, gossamer-light performance in Brooklyn, transforms herself