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Heated Reciprocity: A Radiant though Rudimentary Queer Coming-of-Age

By 2026, queer coming-of-age stories like Girls Like Girls are a dime a dozen. But it is easy to forget how it really has just been less than twenty years or so that queer identity in youth has not been a stigmatized subject. In 2017, Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture. And nowadays, movies like Love, Simon and Bottoms have even mainstreamed the subject, and numerous other teen movies think of nothing of casting multiple queer characters. This wasn’t the case a few decades ago when someone like Hayley Kiyoko, struggling with her sexuality while a teenage actress and singer, would have needed the positive reinforcement.  If Girls Like Girls feels a bit out of the date, that’s somewhat intentional -Kiyoko made it as much for her teenage self as her audience.
It is of course based on her own 2015 song which she then turned into a 2021 novel that is the direct source of her filmmaking debut here. It is Kiyoko’s baby every step of the way, a very personal story that she doesn’t trust with anyone else (perhaps to the point of hiring a virtual lookalike in Myra Molloy to play one of her co-leads). And to her credit a lot of that passion comes out on screen, especially in her visual and tonal choices that are clearly drawn from her experience directing her own music videos. If only the script and storytelling were nearly as inventive.
The movie is set over the summer of 2006 in rural Oregon where seventeen year-old Coley (Maya da Costa) has just moved from San Diego to live with her estranged father (Zach Braff) after the traumatic death of her mother. While out at a restaurant, she catches the eye of Sonya (Molloy), who invites her to hang out with her group of friends. They prove to be a rowdy bunch of teenage assholes way out of step from Coley's introverted personality. Sonya admonishes their behaviour to Coley and soon nurtures a close friendship over AOL Messenger that gradually becomes more and more intimate to the fevered excitement of Coley who'd had an instantaneous crush on her.
Perhaps the most notable facet of how Kiyoko approaches this material is in her accentuation of sexual subtleties between the two girls and the curiosity of her lesbian perspective on this. To both Coley and the audience, how much of Sonya's affectionate overtures are romantic or sexual in nature is a bit hard to parse through the movie's first act, given the conventional intimacies that exist between girl friends that might blur those lines. Things like physical closeness and touching, hushed conversations and instant messaging that Sonya's social circle wouldn't read as queer but that Kiyoko hones in on and makes clear the effect it has on Coley. The setting, atmosphere, and warm cinematography emphasize this as well -there is a constant heat throughout the movie as Coley is more and more aroused by Sonya's closeness, especially when Sonya cuddles up to her during a sleepover and when they come within inches of kissing while swimming in Sonya's backyard pool. It is a very real and frank sensuality that colours this movie, something other coming-of-age queer films sometimes shy away from, yet there is still a teenage innocence about it as it skirts around more overt discussions or depictions, but is all the more resonating as a result. It is very reminiscent in this of something like Celine Sciamma’s similarly themed Water Lilies -and perhaps it is no coincidence both use a recurring water motif, Coley often unwinding by floating in the nearby lake.
But while aesthetically the movie is very interesting and enticing, it’s actual story leaves much to be desired. This is the first screenplay for both Kiyoko and her co-writer Stefanie Scott and you can really tell in a lot of places where the dialogue and characterization is notably clumsy. This is the case for a lot of the early exposition around Coley’s context and relationship to her new town and even in some aspects of Sonya’s flirtations. The pacing is rather off -the whole movie taking place over the course of two months designed to feel longer for the sake of the relationship’s validity -but it doesn’t quite take. It’s clear Kiyoko wants the romance to be more than just puppy love but is unable to relate that through both the time allotted and the evasive behaviour of Sonya which proves a major plot point. And she doesn’t want to stray too far away from that focus into say, the relationship between Coley and her father, a reconciliation that likewise isn’t given space to mean anything. Her only other thematic priority is that of Coley’s trauma about her mother, which for all of its emotional anguish is rather dull and easy as a means of generating sympathy. Da Costa plays it alright, but it never feels like anything more than a placeholder character arc to exist outside of Coley’s feelings for Sonya. Something to fill the third act where Sonya is necessarily absent from the narrative.
Her storyline winds up being painfully cliché, her conflict over her social status and her sexuality incredibly strained. Part of this originates in Kiyoko’s initial conceit for Girls Like Girls in its every iteration wherein the Sonya character is the subjective prize in a subversion of the trope of guys stealing each other’s girls. Coley is meant to steal her away from a dull asshole boyfriend played by Levon Hawke. And the easy way of translating this is by having her occupy the pretty popular girl archetype, with the threat of her outing the major source of tension for her and consequently any kind of meaningful relationship with Coley. So there is a lot of her having to mask when the two are among peers, acting and saying things hurtful to Coley and thus muddying the real nature of her feelings. And it is a grating thing to sit through, especially given the movie doesn’t invest in her perspective until late in the last act and is very hesitant to openly discuss lesbian identity as a teen or the psychology of an atmosphere of homophobia -they are gestured towards but not actually commented on, as though Kiyoko herself  still finds the topic taboo.
It is worth noting that Kiyoko came up with most of this in her early twenties reflecting on her teenage years; hence why the movie’s themes are somewhat shallow and its storytelling very rudimentary. But that same thing makes it more emotionally honest -it does feel personal for as much as its progression is derivative. It captures well the emotional state of girlhood and the nuances of being a queer girl with a crush specifically -in a way that something more manufactured like Crush can’t quite grasp at. Da Costa and Molloy play their parts well -Molloy especially- gelling authentically with the vibe that is perhaps more important to Girls Like Girls than the story. That lushness is tantalizing, doubly so for Kiyoko’s desired audience of queer teens looking for reflection and validation. It is a pretty movie, which I mean in high regard; but it is also only a pretty movie.

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