Remarkable as it seems, there's still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsized-to-large city, in 1962, 1982 or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first pal in your crowd to get a license, using a doctored ID to buy beer, and perhaps even committing the gravest sin against clean, healthy living: smoking.
Not all of those things happen in Gia Coppola's directorial debut, Palo Alto, in which two upper-middle-class but otherwise average kids — played beautifully by Emma Roberts and newcomer Jack Kilmer — find their way to each other, the long way around. But the movie perfectly captures the vibe of late high school, in a way that's both of its time and timeless. Palo Alto is set in the present, an era in which kids can text one another their whereabouts instead of having to walk or drive around aimlessly until they run into someone they know, or might want to know. Yet Coppola, who adapted the movie from James Franco's book of short stories, quietly makes the case that our gadgets can't save us from the eternal fear of not connecting.
The plotlessness of Palo Alto is its own kind of structure, forming an irregular net studded with both golden promise and opportunities for its characters to make some very bad decisions. The movie opens in the middle, or in a middle: In a car parked in an otherwise deserted parking lot, its headlights fixed on the blankness of the wall in front of it, a pixie-faced strawberry-blonde, Kilmer's Teddy, answers the hypothetical questions posed by his best friend, Fred (Nat Wolff), as the two pass a bottle back and forth. "If you were in olden times, what would you do?" Fred asks, though no answer Teddy might give will please him. Fred's a pressure cooker waiting to blow, and although Teddy senses that, he sticks by his friend either out of loyalty or just because he doesn't know what else to do.
There's a girl Teddy likes: Roberts's April. She seems to like Teddy back, but neither knows how to make anything happen. April, dressed in a little spring coat that makes her look like a modern suburban Audrey Hepburn, goes to a party and finds Teddy lounging outdoors with Fred. She plops into a chair nearby, and the two proceed to fail to talk to each other, sort of the way longtime married couples do.
April is probably too distracted to start anything with Teddy anyway: Her home life seems okay, though her stepfather (played by Val Kilmer, father of Jack), who appears to be ill and medicated to the gills with marijuana, insists on rewriting her school assignments for her. And her mother (Jacqui Getty, Coppola's own mother), a woman who looks as if she sprang fully formed from a Pilates apparatus, seems attentive but is in truth checked out. (For young and old alike in Palo Alto, marijuana is one of the basic food groups.)
Meanwhile, April is getting the entirely wrong sort of attention from her soccer coach, the louche, rumpled Mr. B (Franco).
Coppola's filmmaking style is almost paradoxically shy and confident. She uses voiceover dialogue against, say, a sunny blur of trees as viewed from the passenger seat of a car, to keep the action moving between scenes, and not just as a way of explaining the obvious. Though it's hard to say from a debut whether a director has a gift for guiding actors, every performer here is so fully in tune with one another and the material that it's safe to surmise that Coppola may have the touch.
Palo Alto is a movie of exceedingly delicate feeling, the kind you can make only when you're very young or very old. Coppola — granddaughter of Francis Ford, niece of Sofia — is just 27, and her movie, for and about young people, breathes in deeply.
