Lady Bird Understood the Teenage Reinvention Era Before We Did

There’s a moment in your teens when your perfectly normal life suddenly becomes unacceptable. Your hometown is too small. Your parents are doing too much. Your clothes feel wrong. Even your name might need a rebrand. You don’t know exactly who you’re becoming yet, but you just know something has got to change.

Lady Bird gets that restless feeling perfectly. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson wants out of Sacramento and into a bigger, more interesting life, but senior year has a few things to say first: questionable crushes, shifting friendships, money stress, and a mother-daughter relationship where “I love you” and “you’re driving me insane” are basically interchangeable.

That’s what makes the movie hit whether senior year was yesterday or decades ago. Lady Bird remembers when growing up felt like becoming a whole new person, only to realize that some of the people, places, and painfully uncool things you were desperate to leave behind might be the ones you miss most.