A coming-of-age teen dramedy, from the POV of a sub-upper-middle-class Catholic white millennial from California—so I could plenty empathize, and I do appreciate Greta Gerwig representing our generation on the screen, but those intersectionalities mean the conflicts can only be so much, that they're all of a nature of which they'll sort themselves out with the passing of time, and so many dramatic scenes based on them come off as melodramatic performances from the temporality of a teenager (when there's so time & again a dipping POV following the mother, who should be wiser). All that said, the writing is a quite competent Hollywood 3-act screenplay, with plenty of chuckle-inducing lines, multiple tear-rendering deliveries of monologue-y lines, and a rollicking story to fill a feature-length. Watching in 2023 a film from 2017 set in 2002-03 is uncanny, but this is a worthy addition to the canon for the 21st-century's progression of what John Hughes could muster in the '80s, and the hipster touches (e.g. the Joan Didion epigraph the local band) and depictions of life for an adolescent in the '00s stirred in me that romantic yearning for a simpler time of pre-cynic enjoyment of social living. A full dose of emotional content to invest one's bit of time into.