Review: 'The Sky Is Everywhere' traces the trajectory of grief and love, through imaginative imagery and a winning performance by Grace Kaufman

The charmingly off-kilter young-adult drama “The Sky Is Everywhere” hinges on a challenging question for a 17-year-old: When you’ve lost your soulmate, what’s next in your life?

In director Josephine Decker’s adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s Y.A. novel (for which Nelson wrote the screenplay), Lennie (played by Grace Kaufman) is dealing with that question. As she enters her senior year, she’s bearing up after her older sister, Bailey (Havana Rose Liu), died suddenly from a heart arrhythmia. Lennie and Bailey did everything together, and even planned to get into Juilliard together.

Alone, Lennie is consumed by her grief, has trouble rehearsing on her clarinet, and gets challenged for first chair by her perfect preppy classmate Rachel (Julia Schlaepfer). Lennie spends the day wearing Bailey’s sweaters, despite pleas from her grandma (Cherry Jones) to pack up Bailey’s belongings and move on, and walking among the redwoods near their house, which is also occupied by Lennie’s perpetually stoned Uncle Big (Jason Segel).

Further complicating her life, Lennie is simultaneously experiencing her first love and her second. One is Toby (Pico Alexander), Bailey’s morose boyfriend, who understands the weight of their shared grief. The other is Joe (Jacques Colimon), who’s in Lennie’s band class, and is attuned to her musical wavelength. This love triangle propels much of the drama, and the inventive and beautiful flights of magical realism that Decker injects into the story. (The rose garden scene is perhaps the apex of the movie’s imaginative moments.)

Decker is a fast-rising indie director, on the strength of “Madeline’s Madeline” and “Shirley” — and here she takes well-worn themes of teen love and makes them feel fresh and alive, as if Lennie is the first person who’s ever felt them. Through flashback scenes, and some creative animated flourishes, Decker also illuminates the particular bond between Lennie and Bailey, and how no amount of music or kissing is ever going to fill completely the Bailey-sized hole in Lennie’s heart.

Kaufman, a former child star who turns 20 in April, is a real discovery (if you never saw the Matt LeBlanc sitcom “Man With a Plan,” where she played the oldest daughter). Kaufman captures all of Lennie’s conflicting emotions — pain at her sister’s death, guilt at surviving, joy when playing music, and everything else — and always feels authentic doing it. Kaufman is going places, and “The Sky Is Everywhere” will be noteworthy as the movie that gave her that first platform to shine.

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‘The Sky Is Everywhere’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 11, in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual references and drug use. Running time: 103 minutes.