Josephine Decker may be one of our greatest working tellers of ghost stories who doesn’t tell ghost stories.
You can see it in the way she envisions ordinary life as something phantasmic, feel it along her hazily defined boundaries of genre, sense it in the inscrutable ways the protagonists of her most recent movies treat the people around them. Those on the narrative periphery in “Madeline’s Madeline” and “Shirley” may not fear going to bed at night, yet “haunted” is more than an apt word to describe their condition.
So it goes that Decker’s spritzy, familiarly fidgety new movie, “The Sky is Everywhere” – landing on Apple TV+ Friday – is by far her most mainstream effort and by far the one that feels the most explicitly spectral. That the title treatment is presented in the sort of chalky font immediately bringing to mind “The Fault in our Stars” and its legions of coattail-riding knockoffs must feel like a dare that only Deckerheads can recognize, and that only they can embrace from a filmmaker who didn’t have much use for sappiness in her previous works. This time around, Decker provides only a few fleeting glimpses of her requisite phantom, Bailey (Havana Rose Liu), whose absence after a sudden movie-opening death haunts closer-than-close sister Lennie (Grace Kaufman). A gifted musician who now can’t bear to play a note, Lennie’s unable to fathom how the world could keep spinning now that she’s been thrust into the limelight of a story she always assumed she’d be co-authoring.
Jandy Nelson’s screenplay, adapted from her own 2010 novel, takes that element of authorship to heart; “to my astonishment, time didn’t stop with her heart,” Lennie narrates as she returns to school. Sure, it can sometimes feel like “The Sky is Everywhere” is unnecessarily pulling overtime for a story dependent on formula so that it can stretch it to playfully stylistic new lengths, but Kaufman orates the emotional battles her character wages against the turmoils of life and love with just enough desperate grit to be convincing.
For as overqualified as Decker may be to explore the well-trodden land of YA film adaptations, her interests and sensibilities actually make her an appropriate fit for this tone of story–a fact that’s most persuasive when she starts toying with aesthetic tenor. The only thing the filmmaker loves more than unstable minds is wrapping her audience up in the subjectivity driving them. That ethos makes “The Sky is Everywhere” feel like an Eliza Hittman drama someone dumped a bucket of fairy dust all over in its most surreal flourishes. A classroom battle for first chair becomes a showdown; young lovers are literally lifted into the air; and, in a beguiling sequence that recalls the theatrics of “Madeline’s Madeline,” arms covered in green body paint baptize young desire with roses under Ava Berkosky’s twirling camera.
These swings of emotion – fanciful, improvisational and deliciously spontaneous – both work to offset the predictability of the story’s beats while underlining Lennie’s desperation to force herself from the stasis she’s found herself in since losing Bailey. Perhaps it’s purposeful that we feel a bit frustrated by the repetition of the movie’s second half, by Lennie continuously bouncing between adoration for dreamboat Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon) and intimate mutual understanding with her sister’s partner, Toby (Pico Alexander). Few things are more inscrutable and maddening, after all, than traversing a teenage wasteland, let alone one shellshocked by the aftermath of tragedy. What periods in our life are more vivid than those spent grieving? And what position is most stable in those times other than constantly ricocheting between possibility, desire and reckoning?
There’s more than one kind of teenage heartbreak, Decker’s latest ultimately proves, and part of the effect created by the close proximity of her hyper-transmorphic style with the borderline Disney Channel-ness of various infatuations is that the audience gets sucked into the emotional pinball machine of teenagerdom. If trauma is the artistic flavor of the times, “The Sky is Everywhere” manages to convey – even through some predictable narrative beats – that there’s nothing else we wouldn’t rather get a taste of.
"The Sky is Everywhere" is rated PG-13 for language, sexual references and drug use. It's available on Apple TV+ Friday.
Starring: Grace Kaufman, Jacques Colimon, Cherry Jones, Jason Segel
Directed by Josephine Decker
2022
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