Pariah is a moving story of coming of age and coming out

The first ten minutes of Pariah — Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable — sharply reveal the conflicts that seventeen-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. Riding the bus back to her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home after a night out at a lesbian club, she takes off her oversized boy's polo shirt, revealing a light-pink scoop-neck shirt with "angel" written in gold sequins underneath. After we see the large crucifix in her house and meet her mother, who reprimands her for her friendship with butch Laura (Pernell Walker), the reason for the quick change becomes obvious. Like the best films about adolescence, from Truffaut's Antoine Doinel movies to So Yong Kim's In Between Days, Pariah — about one lower-middle-class, African-American lesbian teen — is a profoundly specific film centering on universal themes: discovering who and what you are drawn to, fighting for autonomy against arbitrary parental rules, or, in this case, tyranny. Alike's sexuality, blithely acknowledged at school, remains until its defiant articulation in the closing scenes an open, corrosive secret in her family; even her doting father speaks to her in veiled language. She will eventually throw her mother's own sanctimonious words back in her face, demonstrating the truest spirit of gay pride: standing up to bullies, particularly those who gave birth to you.