Her character in Hustlers was as harebrained and underdeveloped as the action scenes that stretched out Charlie’s Angels were soul-crushing. Nevertheless something about Lili Reinhardt’s poise and screen presence suggested a movie star in the offing. With Grace, the cane-reliant newcomer-cum-class-poet-laureate who drags more in tow than a game leg, signs of an actress begin to emerge. The haughty smirk and up-turned side-glances, reminiscent of a young Joan Fontaine, appear only in flashback montages. Gone, too, are the designer duds: in this romance between Grace and fellow high school newspaper editor Henry (Austin Abrams), the watchword is dress to depress. And distressing it is, though not the viscous drag it might have been. Grace’s initial reluctance to bring anything more than her editorial skills to the paper thaws the moment she decides on “Teen Limbo” as the topic of the final edition. (Her adroit conclusion is drawn from the presence of four teen suicide tomes on their English teacher’s syllabus: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Romeo and Juliet, Catcher in the Rye, and Ordinary People). The dialogue at times packs the maudlin pith of a Sylvia Plath High essay contest (“People are the ashes of dead stars”). But when driven to extremes, a morbid cheekiness takes effect — Henry stalks Grace to the cemetery, where he winds up graveside, Googling the name of her dead boyfriend directly off his headstone. An emphasis on family is put to the test when Henry’s cool parents are in time (and out of necessity) cast in an uncool light. And there’s a logical excuse behind Grace's family allowing a boy they’ve never met to wait alone in her room until she returns, but the presence of an active Koi pond in an otherwise hollowed out plastics factory is never explained. The teen angst didn’t get to me the way it normally would; the emotionalness of the newspaper angle acted as a finger on the critical scale. (2020) — Scott Marks
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