Sundance review: 'Palm Trees and Power Lines' is a precise depiction of a 17-year-old's summer encounter with an older man — but it's an ordeal to watch

It’s possible to admire a movie’s craft and find the subject matter, and its handling of it, absolutely repulsive — which is how I reacted to director Jamie Dack’s coming-of-age-in-a-damn-hurry drama “Palm Trees and Power Lines.”

Lea (played by newcomer Lily McInerny) is a bored 17-year-old wasting her summer in a nameless suburb near a beach that could be anywhere from the Puget Sound to the Florida Panhandle. (The movie was filmed in suburbs near Los Angeles.) She hangs out with the stoner guys, and sometimes lets one of them, Jared (Timothy Taratchila), have sex with her in the back of a car. She spends a lot of time with her best friend, Amber (Quinn Frankel), and avoiding her mom, Sandra (Gretchen Mol), who is dating a new guy and therefore tends to be absent.

One night, when she’s nearly getting caught when her buddies pull a dine-and-dash at a burger joint, Lea is rescued by Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a charming guy who drives a big truck. Tom offers Lea a ride home, and she accepts. They exchange phone numbers, even after Tom informs her that he’s 34 — literally double her age.

The back-and-forth continues, with Tom asking Lea to hang out, then go get dinner, and so on. Lea withholds information from Amber because “I don’t want to jinx it,” saying only that she’s seeing somebody “who goes to another school.” But what Lea perceives as Tom being attentive, we in the audience see it for what it is: Grooming.

Dack, adapting her 2018 short film of the same name, and co-screenwriter Audrey Findlay do an expert job capturing the lazy rhythms of Lea’s laid-back teen life — the days of casually hanging out, watching YouTube tutorials, playing at being grown-ups while still unprepared for the emotional fallout.

And Dack has found an astonishing young star in McInerny, who gives a gut-wrenching performance as a teen who acts tough and smart, but is still aching for affection — the perfect target for an operator like Tom. It’s hard to believe that McInerny’s only other screen credit, according to IMDb, is a momentary role in a 2017 Elton John video.

Even as one acknowledges the quality of McInerny’s performance and Dack’s filmmaking, it’s still an ordeal to actually watch “Palm Trees and Power Lines.” Part of that is the mere depiction of sex trafficking, and how insidiously it works its way into Lea’s life. But there’s also something ponderously predictable in the telling, that sense that we can all see the slow-motion train wreck long before it happens — and when it hits, there’s no relief, only despair.

——

‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’

★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, and screened again Wednesday, January 26, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No more screenings scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably R for strong sexual content and drug use — all involving teens — language and some nudity. Running time: 110 minutes.