Review: 'Janet Planet' is a warmly offbeat look at an 11-year-old girl and her fascination with her mother's free spirit

I’m willing to predict that there will be two schools of thought among critics considering playwright Annie Baker’s movie debut, the mother-daughter drama “Janet Planet” — impatience with the preciousness of the characters, or utter joy at being able to spend time inhabiting the filmmaker’s precisely rendered and emotionally rich memory play.

As you can likely tell, I’m in the second camp. This movie is delightful.

It’s 1991 in the rural part of western Massachusetts — though it could be upstate New York or Oregon or anywhere rustic and hippie-friendly. Lacy (played by newcomer Zoe Ziegler) is a mousy 11-year-old who calls her mom to pull her out of summer camp. Mom, Janet (played by Julianne Nicholson), obliges, and they spend the rest of the summer together in their home in the Massachusetts woods, where Janet also runs her practice as a licensed acupuncturist.

During this summer, though, Janet and Lacy welcome three people in succession into their home. First is Wayne (Will Patton), a live-in boyfriend of sorts. Lacy makes fast friends with Wayne’s daughter, Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), but Wayne is more difficult to know.

After Wayne leaves (Baker throws up a title card that reads “End Wayne” at the conclusion of this chapter), Janet and Lacy go to an avant-garde performance outdoors, and Janet recognizes an old friend in the troupe. That’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who’s trying to escape from the troupe and its charismatic, possibly cult-like leader, Avi (Elias Koteas), and ends up staying with Janet and Lacy while she tries to sort out her future. 

When Regina’s time runs its course, Janet finds that Avi is trying to charm her with picnics and Rainer Maria Rilke poems.

The constant, among all of Janet’s interpersonal entanglements, is Lacy’s quiet acceptance of her mother’s tumultuous life. Mother and daughter spend a lot of time together this particular summer, and Lacy observes a lot more than she can process — and the viewer intuits that Baker, through this warm and offbeat character study, is still processing a lot of it.

Baker handles those scenes, as Lacy learns about adulthood from the less-than-reliable role model she has at hand, with delicacy and poignant humor. She lets the emotional bond between Lacy and Janet unfold on its own terms, sometimes allowing herself as the storyteller to be a bit surprised by where it’s all going — because she’s trusting of her script and her actors to let them run with it.

The showstopper in “Janet Planet” is Nicholson, a veteran movie and TV actor (recently seen in “Marr of Easttown,” “I, Tonya” and “August: Osage County”) who brings both a world-weary resignation and a reservoir of eternal hope to Janet’s quest to understand the world and her place in it. Ultimately, that place seems to be as the most fascinating character in Lacy’s life — as both work to discover how much of each person should be rubbing off on the other.

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‘Janet Planet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 28, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language, some drug use and thematic elements. Running time: 113 minutes.