A sun-flared and bong-addled tumble into a teenage Texan summer rife with bombshells and boyfriend problems, “Cusp,” from debut directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt is one of those fractal-style documentaries, in which any given sliver contains all the colors and contours of the whole. The opening is a case in point: Long-haired girls lounge on a swing in the park, scoffing, wriggling, idly shooting the shit – it could be any year from any of the last five or six decades, except for the phones they glance at every now and then. But then in the background, there’s a popping noise as one of the peripheral guys in their endlessly forming and reforming group whoops and shoots his gun for target practice. The girls scarcely bat an eyelid but there it all is, in that one scene: girlhood, unconsciously hopeful and lovely despite itself, and the darker edge of recklessness and violence – often springing from men and boys – to which they are already resigned.
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This immersive approach, with everything passing in an impressionistic “American Honey” kind of blur, does sacrifice forward momentum. But that is not necessarily a negative, quite the opposite: it takes a strange alchemy – and Hill and Bethencourt’s spectacularly rich and evocative roadside-Americana- style photography – to imbue each sequence with all the light and shade, all the beginnings and endings, of the whole feature. And that goes double in a documentary where you’re a slave to fortune, to what happens to pass in front of your lens. But then, these are teenagers, and if you’re on their wavelength, as the directors undoubtedly are, drama is guaranteed – it wraps around them like warm wind or bonfire smoke, it drips off them like seawater beading in the ends of their hair at the beach. And the central trio here have already, at 15 or 16, lived lives full of stories, none of them fairytales.
Brittney is a blonde whose delicate features make her look absurdly young in certain light. As though to compensate, she ages-up with makeup and extravagant false eyelashes when she goes out, hanging out mostly with older teenagers. “I think I have the maturity,” she says in voiceover, over footage of a boozy, druggy party in someone’s living room. But while that sounds like so much adolescent posturing, Brittney is also perhaps the philosopher of the group. Some of her musings reflect a surprising understanding, for one so young, of exactly how people see her, and where she is located in the span of her life. Teenagers are usually a solipsistic bunch, prone to disbelief at the notion they will ever move differently through the world than they do now. But Brittney has a curiosity about the person she’s going to be that makes her, though she seems to think she’s not so very different from anyone of her age, quite different indeed.
Autumn is her less outgoing friend. Early on, she makes reference to being a bit fearful of the world “because of stuff that happened in the past”; a little later we find out what that was, why it is she lives with her Dad now, and perhaps why it is she has thrown herself so headlong, so needfully into her relationship with her boyfriend Dustin. “I missed you,” she says, nuzzling into his neck on her bed one afternoon. “I know I only just saw you, but I missed you.” “She needs attention like, at least once an…hour?” says Dustin, mildly enough to sound affectionate, but with enough truth to it that although Autumn is devastated when he breaks up with her, it doesn’t come as an enormous surprise to us.
Aaloni is the tough-girl of the bunch, whose own mini-arc of growth across this summer will be learning that maybe it’s better not to deny the tenderer feelings a hard childhood has taught her to repress. Close with her mother – a warm, salty presence in all her kids’ lives – and protective of her younger sister, Aaloni’s attitude toward boys is formed by a stormy relationship with her father, whose bouts of PTSD-related temper at one point cause her and her mother to take shelter in her bedroom rather than risk confronting him. “I don’t want you ever to have to rely on a man,” her mother tells her. “I rely on your dad because Mommy was a fuckup.”
It’s a little depressing that a film concentrated so closely on three young girls would probably only squeak the Bechdel test. The vast majority of their conversation, except maybe when piercing each other’s nipples or eating McDonald’s on a kerbside under buzzing sodium lights under a golden, well-chosen soundtrack, is about the men and boys in their lives. But then the background radiation here is the history all of them share to one degree or other, of sexual violence or abuse. These revelations come thick and fast and with a jaw-dropping casualness: Brittney talks of how you cannot trust men, even longtime friends, going on matter-of-factly to mention the 20-year buddy of her dad’s who molested her as a child. Then we learn there were even court proceedings about it, before a further gut-punch: “The only time I cried was when I lost the case.” This passage feels like a series of bombs going off but Brittney shrugs it away and looks out the window. “It’s so far behind me it doesn’t affect me any more,” she says as if, at 16, anything can be that far behind you.
The themes are heavy; the film is somehow not. Between the three girls, there’s a natural, loose but loyal bond into which it’s really a privilege to feel invited for the brief, blazing duration. The camera, inasmuch as it’s acknowledged at all, becomes the fourth member of this inner circle, a friend they know is on their side and can speak freely in front of. And although they are modern teenagers, there is something endearing about how recognizable their lives will be to anyone who was herself ever a teenage girl; there’s the odd selfie or sext session, but their summer pastimes are more often surprisingly analog. Autumn paints on her porch, fretting about the colors; the gang head to the beach and muck about in wet sand; Aaloni washes the dog in the front yard and helps set up balloons and banners for her sister’s birthday. It’s unusual that “Cusp” doesn’t seek to be the kind of generational snapshot that defines itself in opposition to generations past. There is even, after a truly exhilarating, goose-bump-inducing final montage that assembles impressions of the three girls into a rapid flickbook of summer reminiscences, a quick shot of them jumping off some rocks into the water. That’s a time-honored tradition that again, could come from any time, only this time it’s theirs –few films walk this line quite so well: it is nostalgia in the present tense. [B+]
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