The Most Exciting Films at Sundance Were Made by Women

A very different road-trip film is Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which follows 17-year-old Autumn (the newcomer Sidney Flanigan) as she journeys from central Pennsylvania to New York City to abort an unexpected pregnancy. It’s a stark and forceful tale with a deliberately everyday quality—a career-best effort from the director Eliza Hittman, whose prior film Beach Rats also thrived on naturalistic dialogue and specific local detail. The obstacles that Autumn must overcome to get a safe, legal, and private abortion are punishing, but they’re also sadly mundane: hours spent roaming the Port Authority Bus Terminal in search of cheap food, or riding the subway overnight to avoid paying for a place to stay. The film’s electrifying centerpiece is a questionnaire about Autumn’s pregnancy that offers the multiple-choice options “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “always.” Flanigan’s extraordinary acting in this scene makes Autumn not merely a symbol, but a fully realized character.

Questions of control over one’s body or one’s persona are a constant among many of these women-led works. That theme applies rather wittily to The Nowhere Inn, a mockumentary about the musician St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, directed by Bill Benz (I did eventually make it to a few films by men). The script, which Clark wrote with the musician and comedian Carrie Brownstein, follows Brownstein as she tries to make a concert movie about St. Vincent. Both stars play themselves—or do they? Clark, who is funny, disarmingly natural, and quite an intimidating screen presence when she wants to be, playfully leans into or inverts every trope of the mysterious, egotistical rock idol. The film has just as much fun with the way truths get distorted when a camera is brought backstage.

All that makes The Nowhere Inn an unintentionally apt pairing with Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, Lana Wilson’s actual behind-the-curtain peek at one of the pop world’s biggest names. The film probably won’t change any perceptions of Swift; her fans should gobble it up once it comes to Netflix on January 31, while her detractors will likely remain unconvinced. Still, Wilson (the director of the searing abortion documentary After Tiller) does surface a few revealing moments. Footage of Swift’s spontaneous and inventive musical process in the recording booth is charming; far more interesting, however, is her own acknowledgement of the isolation she’s felt as she struggled to please her critics, and the sense of freedom she found in announcing her political beliefs. Like any artist-approved documentary, the movie can’t escape a manicured quality, but there’s still some thrill to watching Swift mold—and change—her public image.

An even more personal, sometimes wrenching documentary is Kirsten Johnson’s wonderful Dick Johnson Is Dead, also bound for Netflix. Johnson is a longtime documentarian whose last film, Cameraperson, was a bold collage of visual memories she had collected while shooting footage for other movies. Dick Johnson Is Dead delves into Johnson’s own family life to focus on her boisterous and caring father, who is beginning to struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. With her father’s full participation, Johnson essentially creates a eulogy for a man who is still alive, staging broad, jokey “deaths” for him to act out while also talking through his experiences and his bond with his children. Johnson is talented enough to avoid any exploitative pitfalls, making the film a truly successful tribute that should linger on the shortlist for 2020’s documentary awards.