A sequence in which Joe and Lennie bond over Bach becomes a fantasy ballet of flower-adorned nymphs. The Sky is Everywhere has a nerdier sensibility – Lennie is a band geek obsessed with Wuthering Heights – which, combined with Decker’s atmospheric, off-kilter style, feels fresh.Īs in Shirley, Decker’s homage to midcentury horror legend Shirley Jackson which bent the rules of a literary biopic by placing the author in her own plot, The Sky is Everywhere flirts with the conventions of YA through elaborate flourishes of magical realism. It’s familiar territory To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Netflix’s hit YA adaptation which spawned its own trilogy and in-house stars, similarly follows a younger sister in the shadow of an absent older one (though at college, not dead) in the shadow of loss, but with a more poppy, heartthrob bent. The classic love triangle could feel derivative if not for Kaufman’s fine-tuned performance, Decker’s focus on Lennie’s emotional rollercoaster, and the specificity with which each male character matches her yearning to live and return to herself in spite of crushing loss, like two opposite ends of a puzzle piece. And then there’s Joe (Jacques Colimon), a new student and fellow musician, the only person who can coax Lennie out of her grief-addled musical funk and to whom Lennie is immediately attracted. There’s Toby (Pico Alexander), Bailey’s boyfriend, whom Lennie both resents as the person who took Bailey’s time in life and covets as the only person who understands her pain in death. Those emotions mostly pertain to the boys who fill the gaps in Lennie’s life as she returns to school after an absence. Decker infuses Nelson’s screenplay with a potent dose of whimsical fantasy, morphing Lennie’s tortuous bereavement into a lonely house, a romantic musical journey and a garden where other complicated, confusing emotions grow. But through the eyes of Josephine Decker, the film-maker behind the experimental theater trip Madeline’s Madeline and the perversely surprising, deeply under-appreciated psychodrama Shirley, adolescent grief becomes something more confounding, sensual, spiky.
In less capable hands, this catastrophic loss could become the single dominant element of the film, the sap that overwhelms everywhere else.
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