‘Janet Planet’ Review: Mom Means the World to an 11-Year-Old in Playwright Annie Baker’s Indelible Debut

Its almost cosmic, the way kids start out as nothing more than a twinkle in their mothers eye. Then theyre born into heavenly little bodies, orbiting the adults who made them like tiny moons, until such time that they overcome their parents gravitational pull. So it is with Janet Planet, one of those intensely personal portraits of childhood that weve come to expect and appreciate from A24, the indie studio behind Moonlight and Lady Bird and Aftersun and Eighth Grade (the example this one most resembles). The list goes on.

Seriously, as many as 24 different A24 movies could fit this category and now we get playwright Annie Bakers micro-normous take: a small but incredibly specific movie that feels every bit as attentively crafted and evocative as those earlier titles, while remaining wholly unique and distinct from them. Its striking proof of an original sensibility. Baker has made an honest, endearing and occasionally owie portrait of how an 11-year-old girls clingy relationship to her single mom evolves over the course of the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Watching it feels eerily akin to running ones fingers along a scar sustained in childhood and being magically projected back to the moment that injury was sustained.

Like Past Lives director Celine Song, Baker hails from the theater world, where she won a Pulitzer for her three-hour play The Flick a decade ago 16 scenes in which three bored employees sweep popcorn and shoot the breeze in an empty movie theater. Despite its setting, the play could hardly be less cinematic, which inevitably prompts the question of how shell adapt to the new medium. Turns out, the way a first-timers naive attempt at using a pottery wheel might go: imperfect but lovely, reflecting its own wonky sense of originality. The film is oddly structured and a bit flat (theres no score, and the camera rarely budges), and yet its completely devoid of clich, owing largely to the level of detail Baker brings to her characters.

Janet, the mother in question, is played by Julianne Nicholson, a great, earthy actress who doesnt have to bend far to embody a woman who might have been labeled a hippie two decades earlier. But its 1991, and Janet is an acupuncturist with a practice based out of her Western Massachusetts home: a great big cabin, surrounded by trees, with monster windows and vaulted ceilings that must have felt gigantic to a girl like Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), the films main character and the filter through which its being imagined/remembered.

The movie opens at summer camp, though it takes a moment for the audience to get oriented as Lacy climbs out of her bunk, crosses a field where the crickets are in full symphony and reaches a payphone. Im going to kill myself if you dont come get me, she says in what surely ranks among the great opening lines of all time. Lacy can sound dramatic, but if you think about it, shes been on this earth for 11 years, and in that time, shes discovered the buttons to push to get what she wants from her mom. And in this moment, she wants to go home. Hilariously, as soon as she announces her plans to leave (by lying about an accident involving her nonexistent dad) she realizes that her sympathetic fellow campers like her a lot more than she imagined. Childhood is full of such discoveries, as we trial-and-error our way through life, frequently confused about what we really want.

Lacy doesnt make friends easily. But she adores her mom. The instant theyre reunited, she starts trying to elbow out Janets boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton). She wants Mom all to herself not in a conniving horror-movie way, but such that a great many viewers will find familiar. Lying in bed beside Janet at night, Lacy asks her for a piece of you, settling for a strand of hair, which she studies in the dark. Janet Planet isnt realistic per se (certain elements have been either embellished or rendered surreal in the telling), but its grounded in a genuine sense of human psychology.

The movie is broken into three segments, each focused on a different adult who bends the monopoly Lacy has on her mother into a kind of love triangle. First theres Wayne, then an old friend named Regina (Sophie Okonedo) whom Janet rediscovers at a cult-like art colony, and finally Avi (Elias Koteas), the intense leader of that community. Using big on-screen labels, Baker signals as these people enter and exit Lacys life rivals for Janets attention in a pattern that comes to resemble the regional contra dance depicted in the final scene.

Janet Planet benefits from a terrific script in which characters put into words things that real humans struggle to articulate, like Janets well-considered response to Lacys question, Would you be disappointed if one day I dated a girl? But its Nicholson and newcomer Ziegler a slightly birdlike redhead with spectacles and a slight overbite who render these scenes so indelible. We dont go on enough adventures, Lacy complains. The moments Baker imagines are too small to qualify as such, from regular piano lessons to a memorable visit to the local mall, but they add up to something bigger. In her stage work, Baker has proven a master at extracting meaning from the mundane. Janet Planet can feel a little slender at times, possibly even too lean to sustain some peoples interest, but its been designed such that audiences can read as much into as they bring to the experience.