Perfectly timed for Pride month, this is in many ways a conventional coming-of-ager, but refreshing in the way it takes its teenage heroine's queerness as given.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
Courtesy of Focus Features The adaptation trail of “Girls Like Girls” is an unusual one. In 2015, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko released her hyper-catchy song of the same name, bringing a plainly worded statement of lesbian desire — “girls like girls like boys do” — into the viral mainstream, with an accompanying video laying out a compacted five-minute story of two suburban teenage girls finding that their friendship is something more. Co-directed by the singer, the clip was artfully shot and empathetically told, and got fans sufficiently invested that Kiyoko eventually published a YA novel expanding the adventures of its young lovers, Coley and Sonya. And now we come around to “Girls on Girls” the movie, a full decade after the song’s first release — several eons in pop terms, then — but just as fresh and disarming in its articulation of queer self-discovery.
Related Stories
