Palo Alto

Palo Alto is where Californian cool meets suburban listlessness, the shadow of the city’s educational and technological standing inescapable. It’s where teens are blatantly bored, yet are expected to do more. Their acts of rebellion, encompassing the usual acts of drinking, drugs, sex and violence, are on par with their peers, but remain tinted by the promise of a bright future lingering at their door.

Palo Alto is also the film debut of writer/director Gia Coppola, based on the short story collection of the same name by actor James Franco. This considerable pedigree begets a thoughtful feature of lurching ambition, layered emotion and lyrical vision. The youngest filmmaking Coppola and the industry’s most notorious dilettante combine to render the adolescent experience with contemplation, probing the usual coming-of-age tropes in a series of stylish vignettes.

April (Emma Roberts, We’re the Millers) is the sweet and shy centre of the storm of youthful malaise, navigating her way through a reciprocated crush on stoner Teddy (newcomer Jack Kilmer), and the extracurricular attention of soccer coach Mr. B (Franco, This is the End). Teddy has his own troubles, his penchant for taking substances with his best pal Fred (Nat Wolff, Admission) inviting the scrutiny of the authorities. The duo keep circling around each other, spiralling through the hallmarks of their age and area, and cycling in and out of the interrelated escapades of their friends and classmates.

Palo Alto offers a slight snapshot of a time and a place – in terms of the titular location, and of the characters’ life stage – as a microcosm for the sprawling spoils of encroaching maturity. Franco’s stories and Coppola’s script are content to pluck the easy pickings of evident angst and uncertainty; however there’s more to the softly shot scenes of partying and pining than the obvious. The prose reaches for universality; the pictures resound with insularity. At once, the film tells tales so earnestly relatable that they could stem from anyone’s upbringing, and so intimate to the characters that they seem particular and personal. Of course, that’s growing up; what feels unique in the throes of teenage unhappiness too often proves commonplace and collective.

In approaching the material, Coppola asks audiences to do what her protagonists won’t: savour the moment. She lingers on aesthetic details – a cup, a toss of hair, the billowing of smoke – with the same fluidity of her aunt Sofia, and works the mixture of swelling music and hazy images in the same manner. That’s not to call Gia’s efforts beholden to the superficially thematically comparable The Virgin Suicides, for her approach feels like a natural extension of her characters. As they scuttle towards answers that will never come, she mirrors their distracted disaffection in the film’s dreamy styling and drifting compilation.

Coppola also coaxes confident performances out of her cast, from the textured Roberts as her better-known star, to the tender Kilmer in his first film role, to attuned cameos from the latter’s father Val (TV’s The Spoils of Babylon) and Chris Messina (The Mindy Project) as flawed models of parenthood. Delicate roughness dances through in their portrayals and in the sense of the palatable but unpolished subjectivities that reflects the feature itself. In Palo Alto, all facades are exposed as fragile, but the secrets they hide are forever shared.