Apple TV+ The Sky Is Everywhere (2022)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Title: The Sky Is Everywhere (2022)

Tagline: Live fearlessly. Love endlessly.

Genre: Drama, Romance, Music

Director: Josephine Decker

Cast: Grace Kaufman, Pico Alexander, Jacques Colimon, Cherry Jones, Jason Segel, Ji-young Yoo, Havana Rose Liu, Madisyn Wood, Julia Schlaepfer, Tyler Lofton, Destiny Ekwueme, Lukas Stoiber, Rae Robison, Sarah Rose Douglas

Release: 2022-02-11

Runtime: 103

Plot: Lennie is a teen musical prodigy grieving the death of her sister when she finds herself caught between a new guy at school and her sister's devastated boyfriend. Through her vivid imagination and conflicted heart, Lennie navigates first love and first loss.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Filmmaker Josephine Decker broke through in a big way a few years back with Madeline's Madeline, about a teenage actress whose real life and performances get increasingly blurred. She followed that up with Shirley, an experimental and unconventional biopic about novelist Shirley Jackson.

Like those two films, this one is explores how life impacts the creative process, and is told through the very subjective lens of its protagonist and narrator, Lennon "Lennie" Walker. Lennie is a musical prodigy destined to become one of the top clarinet players in the country, who is cruising toward a spot at Julliard until her beloved older sister drops dead from a congenital heart defect, the same one that killed their mother. Suddenly the life that Lennie had spent riding in her sister's wake is bereft, and devoid of direction.

Jandy Nelson adapted her young adult novel of the same name for the screen, and a lot of the movie's shortcomings are anchored in Nelson's choices. The movie has a tendency to fetishize grief; Lennie spends a great deal of the running time obsessing about her sister's death, but too often this grief is expressed in shallow, surface ways. Like many heroines from young adult novels, there is an element of wish fulfillment in the depiction of Lennie's life: The quirky house near the coast in northern California, living with an equally quirky grandmother and aunt; the two extremely handsome boys who are falling over themselves for her; the best friend who doesn't seem to have a life outside of worrying about Lennie's; the natural musical talent that persists even after a long period of neglect. Lennie's grief too often feels like a way to make Lennie more interesting as part of this storybook life than it does like a genuine process of mourning.

Grace Kaufman, previously best known for playing the television daughters of the male leads on science fiction drama "The Last Ship" and CBS sitcom "Man with a Plan" stars in this as Lennie Walker. It's a performance that starts out too earnest by half, but gathers steam as the movie chugs along. By the end credits, I found Kaufman's turn as Lennie remarkably endearing; she gave Lennie warmth and life even when the material wasn't quite strong enough in the script.

Cherry Jones and Jason Segel also elevate their scenes as Lennie's grandmother and uncle respectively. Gram is an artist and a horticulturalist, and her home and her life have all the trappings of a former hippie who never entirely abandoned the lifestyle. But Jones imbues her with a firmness that never leaves any doubt that she is the family's matriarch. Segel's character on the surface seems like a burnout: extremely lowkey, and lives with his mother even though he's in his forties. But he's a patient and present parental figure; Lennie, who was conceived via sperm donor, never had a father. Since her mother's death, he has quietly stepped into that role, and even though he doesn't speak about it, it's clear from Segel's performance that his character buried a daughter more than a niece. If Lennie's grief is big and loud, the grief of her grandmother and uncle is quiet and reserved, and mostly observed at the margins. Because of that restraint, I believed it more than Lennie's.

I liked Pico Alexander's performance as Toby, the boyfriend of Lennie's late sister. The dynamic between Lennie and Toby is incredibly fraught, since their feelings for one another are wrapped up in their feelings for the person they both lost. With the wrong performance, Toby could have come across as incredibly sleazy. As played by Alexander, Toby feels like a decent guy who is making imperfect choices in the face of a loss that he can't quite get his head around.

It's far from a perfect film, and I frequently wished it would dig deeper. But Kaufman is likable as hell in the central role, even when her character isn't, and the filmmaking kept me captivated even when the story didn't.

The teen supporting characters are fine, and the actors who play them are fine. But they're all pretty wafer thin.