Vivid Portrait of Teen Confusion

Big Girls Don’t Cry is notable for two impressive debuts: It’s writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s first feature, and its star, Ani Palmer, has never before acted onscreen. Together, they illuminate a messy, searching vibrancy in the story of Sid, a sex-curious small-town 14-year-old who wants more than anything to be cool. The movie — the first produced feature from A Wave in the Ocean, a filmmaking course led by Jane Campion — is alive to the ways that girls, eager for acceptance, can pretend to be tougher and more experienced than they are, and adds the complicating element of queer attraction to the emotional confusion.

Schneideman’s keenly observed drama could have been more concise on its way to its culminating New Year’s Eve party, but this story of the summer holiday break in rural New Zealand pulses with a powerful sense of place and terrifically charged scenes of chaotic intimacy, its exceptional performances led by Palmer, Rain Spencer and Noah Taylor.

The movie is set in in 2006, when cellphones aren’t yet smart and the stuttering screeches and hisses of the dial-up internet form a kind of soundtrack to the teen social scene. Sid lives in a remote coastal corner of New Zealand’s North Island, in a rambling house she shares with her distracted, short-tempered father, Leo (Noah Taylor), a frustrated painter who makes a living doing lawn maintenance, and whose wife left not just him but the country.

Sid, who has been checking out sex chat rooms, embarks on a mission of sorts as her summer break begins — a pursuit that quickly means leaving her level-headed best friend, Tia (the excellent Ngātaitangirua Hita), in the dust. With gifts of alcohol from her father’s stash, she toadies up to older girls Lana (Beatrix Wolfe) and Stevie (Sophia Kirkwood-Smith), and though it’s only a matter of time before alpha meanie Lana turns on her, something like friendship develops. (Karen Inderbitzen Waller’s costumes are fully in sync with the notion of youthful investment in the number-one priority of looking cool.)

In the nearby beach town Ōmaha, the three girls are drawn into the party scene led by rich kid Kyle (Ian Blackburn). One of the many out-of-towners who arrive for the summer, he holds court in a spacious waterfront house where his parents are never home — and where Leo does the yard, as revealed in a scene of excruciating mortification for Sid.

As she tries to navigate and climb the teenage social hierarchy, Sid inflicts no small amount of damage on herself and others, beginning with an impulsive self-piercing. Her transparent lies become more pathetic as she tries to convince herself as well as her frenemies that she’s knowledgeable and experienced when it comes to sex.

It’s not just Lana’s popularity that draws Sid; she has a crush on her, though she doesn’t yet have a language for her attraction to girls. Using the computer at Tia’s house, she logs into the instant messenger account of Diggy (Poroaki Merritt McDonald), Tia’s brother, and flirts with Lana, going so far as to ask her for racy photos. But as she continues to ingratiate herself to Kyle and his crude, immature buddies while evading their expectations, someone even more compelling than Lana grabs her attention. Her sister, Adele (Tara Canton), home from college for the holidays, has brought a classmate with her, American exchange student Freya. Rain Spencer (The Summer I Turned Pretty) imbues the role with a sensual aura and self-confidence reminiscent of Léa Seydoux.

Dispensing offhand worldliness and wisdom through a steady stream of pot smoke, Freya ignites something in Sid. Her kindness, too, is no small thing for a girl whose mother is far away and who’s in constant conflict with her father and sister; Schneideman and her cast grasp the ways families gripe and snipe at one another.

Freya ignites something in Leo, too, who prepares a fancy dinner the night of her arrival and later presents her with a Dylan Thomas book. In Taylor’s superb performance, Leo is both comically cantankerous and utterly heartbreaking. The friction between Sid and Leo, with its awful explosions and exquisite rapprochement, is the most satisfying thread of the narrative.

With the fine contributions of production designer Sarah Cooper and cinematographer Maria Ines Manchego, Schneideman captures the pristine beauty of the setting and the exultation of bodies in water, as well as the unvarnished patina of lived-in spaces. Through the eyes of an ambitious girl who, in the way of teenagers immemorial, is using borrowed language as she fumbles toward her own, Big Girls Don’t Cry is a strong portrait of a memorable season in the sun.