Review: In the quietly observed 'Good One,' a teenager grapples with aggressions small and big (2024)

A woodsy hike becomes a Petri dish of human nature in “Good One,” writer-director India Donaldson’s tense, revealing and exquisitely composed feature debut about a 17-year-old at the cusp of adulthood. In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, “Good One” is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.

Its watchful soul is a New York daughter of divorce, Sam (Lily Collias, a real find), who with her remarried architect dad, Chris (James Le Gros), is expecting their Upstate excursion to be a backpacking foursome. But when the teenage son of dad’s oldest pal, Matt (Danny McCarthy), bows out at the last second, making them a trio, Sam finds herself without a peer, a deflation that Collias perfectly conveys without words from the SUV’s backseat. Over an endurance test of a weekend, we’ll get to know this Mona Lisa-esque face very well as Sam’s microexpressions and utterances betray fascinating variations on “How did I get here?”

That’s because the trip quickly becomes the Matt and Chris show, a long-running two-hander stuffed with bickering, personality tics and grievances that suggests a friendship of opposites long past its sell-by date. Sam’s gently patronizing dad, masterfully rendered by one of our most underappreciated actors (when will James Le Gros get his Oscar?), is an uptight, over-organized weekend warrior with little tolerance for his old chum’s shambolic quality and self-mythologizing patter. Matt, meanwhile, is avuncular and parlor-philosophical, but in McCarthy’s perfectly captured performance of an ego barely hanging on by some well-chewed fingernails, he can barely hide how depressed he is about a life gone sideways, or how hurt he is by Chris’s jabs.

James Le Gros, right, and Danny McCarthy in the movie “Good One.”

(Metrograph Pictures)

It all leaves Sam in a situation where she’s not only a lone target for the pair’s “These kids today”-style ribbing, but also, by turns, a personal assistant, cook, advisor and peacekeeper. (When Sam tends to her period squatting behind a tree, the vibe is of a worker’s ill-timed break.) A quality getaway with loved ones starts to feel like managing a suffocating situation. Even her sympathy gets weaponized: When she indulges Matt’s harmlessly random musings or laughs with him, you can feel her father’s irritation rise.

“Good One” is soexpert at tracking a young woman’s emotional intelligence — as amusing, preciseand patient as a Kelly Reichardt film like “Certain Women” — that when the moment arrives when everything shifts, it’s a legitimate surprise. Don’t call it a twist, though. (No spoilers here.) It’s a built-in hinge, and the melodrama-averse Donaldson treats it as such, letting it open the door for a final act of decision-making and discovery that positions Sam as emerging from this odd, illuminating trip a more self-possessed individual.

So much of this psychologically complex movie’s artistry is wonderfully assured, from cinematographer Wilson Cameron’s textured intimacy with nature and faces, to the tenderly applied, deceptively varied music. But what most gives me hope for Donaldson as a filmmaker, however, is how much she cares about the lost magic of scene work, those building blocks of human interaction — movement, composition, dialogue, pacing, depth and in this case the gifts of an incredible newcomer in Collias — that fuse us to a movie’s internal logic, its intangibles. “Good One” is as complete a piece of storytelling as you’ll see all year. For a pot of frogs coming to a boil, it’s a great place to be.