Finally released in Ireland earlier this year following a long and troubled gestation, Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature is a sprawling story of teenage angst featuring a tour-de-force performance from Anna Paquin that went shamefully unrecognised during awards season. She plays Lisa, a high school student whose eloquence hides her immaturity. Heedlessly distracting a bus driver, she is jointly responsible for the death of a pedestrian.

Attempting to come to terms with her guilt for her role in the accident and the cover-up in which she and the driver engage, Lisa begins to unravel somewhat as she realises that the adult world is one of ambiguity and compromise, while she believes in absolutes. Lonergan creates in Lisa one of recent cinema’s most honest and believably complex young female characters. 

This film will be screened in its recently-released extended cut (179 minutes).

Screening as part of Teenage Kicks: American Teens on Film (August 4th – 28th).