This coming-of-age drama follows Jem Starling as she becomes an adult--or at least starts to become an adult. It explores the conflict between Jem's growing awareness of her body and its needs and the beliefs of the fundamentalist church that plays a large part in her life and her family's life. Her family is also a source of conflict: before his conversion, her father had been a musician with a steady gig at a bar in Memphis, and the temptations of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll return after the suicide of one of his former band members. What music is for her father, dance is for Jem and she contrives to lead the church's dance troupe by charming Owen, the church's youth pastor who has just returned from Puerto Rico. Eventually, Owen and Jem begin an affair that is transgressive in almost every possible way: Owen is married, he is the brother of Ben, who is officially courting Jem, and both Owen and Ben are the sons of the church's pastor. The ending is pleasantly ambiguous: we see that Jem follows her powerful need to know about the world and what her place in it ought to be, but not exactly where that takes her.
The cast is very good and Eliza Scanlen, who is in almost every scene, makes a good Jem. Wrenn Schmidt is also excellent as Heidi, Jem's mother who is trying to hold a large family together while her husband and her eldest daughter lose their minds. For many viewers, a fundamentalist church in Kentucky might seem an 'exotic' milieu, but the film doesn't treat its characters like the subjects of an ethnographic expedition. The first half of the film sets the scene at a leisurely pace, but tensions build in the second half as we wonder when the lovers will be discovered and what the consequences will be.
