More than 50 years ago, I unsuccessfully attempted to run away from summer camp. At this distance details are fuzzy, but I was around 10 or 11, and it was my first childhood sleep-away experience. Also my last: clearly, I was having none of it, and even though the camp lasted a week or less, I wanted out. I made it as far as the wilds of Griffith Park (this was in Los Angeles), when I was discovered and returned to my cabin.

I say this to establish that I know what it’s like to be weird a kid (and a redhead, which didn’t help). It’s certainly germane to Janet Planet, Annie Baker’s magical film debut as both writer and director—which begins with 11-year-old Lacey threatening to kill herself if her mother (the Janet of the title) doesn’t retrieve her immediately from summer camp. In this case, the request is successful. Lucky Lacey: she gets to spend the summer with her enchanting if complicated mom.

What I’ve just described is more than the set up—really, it’s the whole plot. Those who know Baker from her marvelous plays, which include The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation, and my personal favorite, John—won’t be surprised. She is not really interested in conventional narrative, and I’m delighted to see she maintains that here.

Rather, Baker’s work is a study in mood and character, existing both in and out of reality and conventional time. Janet Planet is in a sense quite specific about some of this. It takes place in 1991, and is clearly delineated by the seasons, beginning in early summer and ending with the coming of Fall. But everything that falls within that frame has a dreamlike quality that dilutes any concrete sense of what’s going on.

For me, there’s an element of satire here, or at least a sardonic puncturing of genre and audience expectation. On the surface, Janet Planet evokes a beloved film and literary theme: following a young person through a summer that becomes a right of passage, with adolescence marking a transition: from childhood to the brink of becoming an adult, usually with lessons learned that evoke both sweetness and tears. (Robert Mulligan’s 1971 movie Summer of ’42 specifically comes to mind, but I’m sure there are others.)

View Janet Planet trailer here

It’s here that Baker’s familiar, inimitable voice takes over. We see only bits and pieces of each relationship, and have little sense how they started. (Wayne, a clearly temporary boyfriend, barely utters two or three sentences.) What we see more of are the endings, though these too are ambiguous—mostly they fade away.

As both director and writer, Baker underscores the general elusiveness in a way that echoes her writing for theater, yet feels exactly right for this movie. Rarely is any scene conventionally structured. The action sometimes seems to begin midway, or to cut off in the middle (literally stopping mid-word). At other times, a scene will seem to be over, but we remain visually fixed on the action for many seconds before we move away. Dialogue can be nearly inaudible and is frequently punctuated by long silences and pauses (a Baker trademark). The ultimate effect is both gripping and off-putting, awkwardly funny and eerily destabilizing. Which, I imagine, is just what she wants.

Certainly, for Baker fans a particular interest here is seeing her transition from stage writer to screen—and even more, how she adapts to visually representing her work. It’s a joy in Janet Planet to process how she wants her world to be seen, and the idiosyncratic beauty of it (Maria von Hausswolff is the superb cinematographer).

Views of the town mall are in pale, slightly washed-out color and have a directness without judgment that still manages to capture something rather bleak underneath (I thought of the photography of Stephen Shore or William Eggleston, though it’s not all the way to Eggleston-ian grimness). The leafy rural landscape is also filmed in a subdued, nostalgia evoking palette: a picnic late in the movie suddenly evokes Renoir.

It is Janet’s relationship with Lacey that is, of course, the most fundamental one, and it’s marvelously real and open. I think we’d all love a mother who is so non-judgmental. When Lacey asks a question—as in wondering if Janet would disapprove if Lacey were in love with a woman—the answer is thoughtful and surprising.  (Lacey, despite her initial threat, is not suicidal; she’s also not happy. She just is.)

Along the way, Baker has many utterly delightful if small-scale surprises to offer us. In what surely is a tip to her theater roots, she slyly embeds references of the “if you know, you know” variety. Two in particular charmed me. Lacey is attached to miniature dolls and furnishings, creating tiny tableaux—similar to Laura’s glass menagerie. And the movie’s most overtly comic sequence—a bizarre outdoor theatrical spectacle, part play, part religious ceremony—surely is a wry hommage to poor Konstantin’s strange experimental play in The Seagull. (Much about Baker’s writing both here and for the stage is quite Chekhovian, and she has adapted his Uncle Vanya.) 

I realize I’ve said nothing about the acting, which… in the best sense… doesn’t feel at all like acting. Julianne Nicholson is a miracle of understatement and quiet compassion at Janet. As Lacey, newcomer Zoe Ziegler is astonishing—completely free of artifice and never softening the character’s exasperating quirkiness.

Playing Wayne, the first of Janet’s male companions, Will Patton suggests a sense of unease without seeming to do anything at all. (Patton was also a memorable force in Baker’s play, The Antipodes.) Elias Koteas, in the more sympathetic role of Avi, the leader of the theater group (“not quite a cult, “as Janet describes it) is simultaneously charismatic and slightly foolish. Only Sophie Okonedo, as Janet’s female friend, feels “actressy,” which is as it should be, since she is very much part of Avi’s group, as well as his girlfriend.

Janet Planet—and indeed, Annie Baker’s work more generally—isn’t for everyone. At the screening I attended, an elderly man in front of me muttered through most of it, ultimately leaving in a huff mid-movie. But my sense was more of the audience was transfixed and delighted. I certainly was—my hope is that Baker will continue to work both sides of her craft (plays and movies). She’s an American treasure.