Last night I decided on another double feature at the Broadway and I started with Good One because I missed it at Sundance this year. I absolutely loved this character-driven coming of age story. Seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) has weekend plans to backpack through the Catskills with her father Chris (James Le Gros), who is divorced from her mother and has a younger wife and new baby at home, his best friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), who is currently going through a messy divorce, and Matt's teenage son Dylan. When Dylan backs out of the trip at the last minute because he is angry about the divorce, Sam is left on her own with two men who are extremely dissatisfied with their lives. At first they are benignly dismissive of her (I was particularly struck by how annoyed they are whenever they have to wait for her to take a bathroom break to change a tampon) and assume that she will complete all of the menial tasks around the campsite while they get drunk and swap stories to one up each other. Then, in one moment fraught with tension, everything changes and Sam realizes that she is not safe with them. Almost all of the action takes place in the wide expanse of the great outdoors but it still feels incredibly claustrophobic because of how the three characters interact with each other and how the shots of these interactions are framed. Collias gives a highly nuanced performance because so much of what is happening is left unsaid but you can intuit exactly what Sam is thinking by the subtle change in her body language and expression as she becomes aware of her father's flaws, especially in a scene where she rests on a boulder by herself because you can see her steeling herself for what is to come. This is definitely a slow burn but I found it to be extremely compelling and powerful.
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