The Tribeca Film Festival is wrapping up. Their awards were given out yesterday and Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s “Good Girl Jane” won the top prize.
Mintz’s film is semi-autobiographical, recounting her transfer to an L.A. high school where she ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd. The lead actress here is a young woman by the name of Rain Spencer and she’s very good in the titular role — she even ended up winning the Best Actress award.
Jane is a shy teenager who ends up hanging with the wrong people and falling for the wrong guy, a drug dealer (Patrick Gibson) much older than her. He grooms her and uses her naïveté to get inside her pants. Never for a moment do you believe this scum’s intentions are noble.
We’ve seen this movie before, time and time again. “Good Girl Jane” falls in the same line as far superior films in the teens-gone-haywire subgenre; “Kids,” “Fish Tank,”“Thirteen,” “White Girl,” and the upcoming “Palm Trees and Power Lines.”
I respect Mintz’s courage to tell her story, which is based off her short film of the same name. I didn’t see many Tribeca titles, maybe six or seven, but this just wasn’t a memorable one. “Good Girl Jane” is surface-level stuff. [C]