Janet Planet Orbits a Troubled Mother-Daughter Relationship

Whether Janet Planet is a nostalgic film is difficult to determine. Baker ekes amusement out of the outmoded set pieces and costuming of her youth in a way that invites comparison to fellow millennial (and sister-in-law) Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), set in post-9/11 Sacramento. But whereas Gerwig tracks a mother-daughter relationship through the end of adolescence, Baker constrains herself to a much uglier period of development: middle school. Janet Planet is not a period piece, insofar as the quasi-Buddhist pop psychology and fetishistic pursuit of “alternative” lifestyles that have plagued white liberals since the Johnson administration, at least, have never been more ubiquitous than they are now. Janet is a flower child beginning to wilt, a fact that Lacy, who sees the bad in everything, can’t help but notice.

Or almost everything. Lacy likes people who aren’t trying to sleep with her mom, practicing piano, and girls her age who deign to show her a modicum of kindness. The film opens at summer camp, where Lacy sneaks out of her cabin in the middle of the night. From a pay phone, she calls her mother collect: “Hi,” she says, “I’m gonna kill myself.” Janet arrives the next morning, but as Lacy prepares to depart, spinning a wishful yarn about her stepfather’s motorcycle accident for cover, another camper gifts her a troll doll, prompting Lacy to tell Janet, “I thought nobody liked me, but I was wrong.” “This is a bad pattern,” Mom responds. Wayne (Will Patton) looks to be the stepfather in question, but he and Janet are not married, and there he is, leaning against a car parked in a field. “I’m not going to kick him out just because you wanted to come home from camp,” is Janet’s answer to her daughter’s complaint, and as the car drives off to a cassette of Merle Haggard’s “Here Comes the Freedom Train,” the first act begins.

Anti-theatrical or not, Janet Planet draws attention to its formal structure, announcing each act with a title card named after a different interloper in Lacy’s summer at home. “Wayne” comes to an end after a migraine that he believes Janet “transferred” to him leads to his slamming a door in Lacy’s face and, at the girl’s recommendation, a break-up—but not before an idyllic day at the mall (an expertly scouted, period-specific fossil) with Wayne’s daughter, Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), who does not live with her father, as Lacy, naïvely or not, reminds him incessantly, obnoxiously prying for the reason why. “I’d like to be friends with her,” Lacy tells the couple over a mostly silent dinner on the deck, “I usually have a hard time making friends.” Later, once it is clear that her connection with Sequoia will remain short-lived, Lacy says, “You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is like hell.” Janet replies, “I don’t like it when you say things like that,” but with the caveat, “I’m actually pretty unhappy too.”