20th Century Women (M). Director: Mike Mills. Starring: Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Lucas Jade Zumann. 137 minutes
The title is somewhat of a sleight-of-hand for a film that is centrally about a teenage boy. Fifteen-year-old Jamie (Zumann) provides a semi-autobiographical avatar for filmmaker Mills to explore, through fiction, the formative influence of the women who contributed to his upbringing in the late 1970s. First among the women in Jamie's life is his mother Dorothea (Benning), a free-spirited divorcee, whose decidedly liberal parenting style is also marked by an almost manic love and concern for her son.
When Jamie nearly dies following some risky schoolyard hijinks, Dorothea begins to doubt her ability to raise him alone. Desperate to ensure he grow up to be a decent man, she conscripts her tenant, photographer Abbie (Gerwig), and Jamie's best friend, Julie (Fanning), to pitch in. The two women agree grudgingly; both are navigating their own emotional and physical trials, and can perhaps see better than Dorothea the good job she has done to date with raising the manifestly mature and sensitive Jamie.
Abbie is being treated for cervical cancer, which, in an effective bit of historical verisimilitude, is revealed to be a result of her mother's use of DES, a known side effect of the by-then banned fertility drug. Still she takes Jamie under her wing, introducing him to the paired liberating movements of punk rock and second-wave feminism. Both lead to illuminating experiences for Jamie, from his first rock concert, use of alcohol, and kiss, to being beaten for casting aspersions on a peer's grasp of female sexual anatomy.
Jamie's relationship with Julie on the other hand provides a difficult counterpoint to his engagement with Abbie's feminist texts. Julie is the only one of the women not drawn from Mills' own experiences, and as a result is the most thinly conceived, though Fanning brings a quiet charisma to the role, and the character serves a thematic purpose. She often sleeps in Jamie's bed, but despite his gentle urging, refuses to have sex with him. For her, sex and intimacy are immiscible, and so sex would necessarily ruin their friendship.
This frustrates Jamie, whose peevish concern over his friend's promiscuity with other men seems largely possessive in nature; his theoretical understanding of women's agency falling down in the face of adolescent hormones. Nonetheless Julie, as one of Dorothea's reluctant anointed, tries to help Jamie