Christianity gets a kicking in raw, coming-of-age romance
Dir Desiree Akhavan Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Jennifer Ehle, Marin Ireland, John Gallagher jnr, Quinn Shephard
The history of film is speckled with moments in which a star already well known to you makes you sit up and watch them in an entirely new light. For Chloë Grace Moretz – previously child performer, turned Hit-girl, turned highly marketable teen rebel, but not hitherto a critical favourite – that moment lands about halfway through The Miseducation of Cameron Post, during a kitchen singalong at a Christian correction retreat. The 4 Non Blondes song What’s Up?, from 1992, is on the radio, and Moretz grabs a potato peeler as an impromptu mike. Her growling karaoke performance, jumping up on to the worktop before the first chorus, feels both spontaneous and born of obsession. She reaches for the song’s blessed release like a starving urchin proffered a rib-eye.
Her rendition is cut brutally short, because the radio station is verboten to this centre’s residents – strictly Christian rock only – and the headmistress, played with gracious severity by Jennifer Ehle, has no time for fooling around. Her job is to bring these kids under the yoke: they’re all gay, or, because homosexuality doesn’t exist, have been found indulging in SSA (same sex attraction). They must have this side of themselves ironed out or simply discarded, like the cassette tape of songs by The Breeders (the irony!) that Cameron (Moretz) has to relinquish on her first day. “I’m guessing The Breeders aren’t singing in praise of the Lord,” chides Ehle’s brother, the cheery, himself straightconverted Reverend Rick (John Gallagher jnr), as he whisks it away.
A Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance this year, this second feature from Desiree Akhavan, maker of 2014’s incisive contemporary romcom Appropriate Behavior, is adapted from Emily Danforth’s 2012 coming-of-age novel, and set in the early Nineties
– not that attitudes to SSA in certain heartland states have conspicuously changed since then. Akhavan’s film manages a lovely weariness in its attitude to this dogma, along with a bursting empathy for young people. Cameron forms a unit of sorts with fellow “disciples” Jane (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck), an American Indian boy who identifies as “two-spirit”, meaning both male and female souls are entwined inside him.
Akhavan could have given this lot a heap of stacked victories, by caricaturing the prison they’re in and making the wardens hissable cutouts, but she resists, seeking out nuance and understanding instead. Gallagher’s character doesn’t even pretend he has any answers when another boy called Mark (Owen Campbell, superb) self-harms. Everyone in this place is basically in the same mess, even the characters who pretend they’re helping clean it up, like Cameron’s disapproving room-mate (Emily Skeggs). The last of the film’s sex scenes is a night-time fumble between these two, fraught with instant denial on one side and bafflement on the other.
Earlier, Akhavan has sketched in Cameron’s backstory: her first fling with a girl, Coley (Quinn Shephard), which leads to their prom-night discovery on a car’s back seat. The hunger of their scenes together, beautifully framed and convincingly played, conveys a raw truth that no amount of psychobabble can hope to undo. Akhavan proves herself here as one of our freshest new voices in the realistic treatment of sex on screen, unafraid to make it count for something in the moral battleground that sees Disney, say, excising samesex kisses from its own programming.
And what a step up for Moretz this is. There’s eye-rolling resignation in her performance, then bottomless despair, then tentative hope. The last shot of the film is one of those images that’s allowed to linger, silently answering everything, and giving your eyes enough time to flit between three runaway youngsters, whose realignment over the film’s course exactly flips the one initially prescribed. They look – there’s no other way of putting it – born again.