'Janet Planet' exerts a delicate but powerful gravitational pull

Annie Baker’s closely-observed debut plays at Wisconsin Film Festival

(Photo courtesy of A24)

At first, the viewer might take the rigid formalism of “Janet Planet” as the caution of a first-time filmmaker, in this case playwright Annie Baker (“The Flick”), who isn’t yet comfortable with the tools of filmmaking. The film has no score, and she rarely moves the camera, instead relying on fixed, composed shots.

But it quickly becomes clear that the naturalistic technique is deliberate and precise, a confident approach that gets the audience to focus on the minute interactions and reactions of its two characters, a mother and daughter in tight orbit around each other. By the end of this small, remarkable film, “Janet Planet” feels like its own entire world.

“Janet Planet” played Saturday at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison and will be released by A24 on June 21.

Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is an acupuncturist and single mother living in a post-hippie community in western Massachusetts in the summer of 1991. She’s earthy and charismatic, the sort of person who draws people towards them without really trying to, including a string of disappointing boyfriends.

Janet’s 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is the exact opposite. Forthright and watchful, she observes other people from the sidelines while her mother dives in. Lacy says she has no friends, which is “a complete mystery to me,” and a mystery to the viewer, since both her and Ziegler are absolutely adorable. 

Her entire life revolves around her mother, and “Janet Planet” unfolds over that summer as she watches Janet go in and out of relationships, all of which Lacy disapproves of to some degree. At first there’s Wayne (Will Patton), taciturn and unfriendly. Then there’s Regina (Sophie Okenodo), an old friend of Janet’s who escapes a cult-ish commune, and knows how to push Janet’s buttons as only old friends do. Finally, there’s Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of the commune, who shares Janet’s gift for attracting people, but for possibly more malevolent reasons.

Every tiny detail of Janet and Lacy’s world is perfectly observed, from the “Free Tibet” bumper stickers to the figurines on Lacy’s shelves to the vintage mall that Lacy and Wayne’s daughter run through in a moment of giddy abandon. That attention to specifics extends to every character, particular in the gulf between the people they want to be and the flawed, sometimes selfish, sometimes well-meaning people they are. There’s definitely some quiet comedy in that gap, but “Janet Planet” never satirizes or condescends to its characters.

Janet and Lacy make a fascinating mother-daughter team, sometimes talking frankly to each other as if they were both adults, other times as grown-up and child. Every question Lacy has (and she has a lot of them), Janet strives to answer honestly. 

It’s a moving portrait of familial love that also acknowledges how much we don’t know about even the people closest to us. If there’s a dramatic arc over “Janet Planet,” it’s in Lacy slowly seeing her mother as a person, not the end-all and be-all of her existence. As the stunning, wordless final scene shows us, there’s both sadness and joy in that awareness.