When Growing Up Happens in a Single Conversation

Coming-of-age movies tend to follow the same patterns. Over the course of a school year (or a summer), a young person assesses their relationships. There are breakups, makeups, and a climactic rite of passage. The hormonal intensity of adolescence feels epic, like a saga of triumphs and failures en route to maturity.

Good One, a deceptively simple Sundance gem just released in theaters, depicts all of that emotional chaos in just three days, in the middle of the woods. Its protagonist, 17-year-old Sam (played with remarkable precision by newcomer Lily Collias), is about to head to college, but she’s not stressing out about her next chapter. Instead, she’s going on a backpacking trip with her father, the anxious and self-absorbed Chris (James Le Gros), and his old friend Matt (Danny McCarthy), a recent divorcé who at the last minute fails to persuade his teenage son to tag along on the excursion as planned. An experienced camper, Sam takes the change in stride, spending much of the weekend—and the movie’s 90-minute run time—observing and humoring the middle-aged men. She’s the titular well-behaved child; she may chafe at the way Chris and Matt bicker and banter, but she’s proud of being so helpful and understanding.

And then the film pivots, so slightly that it’s almost imperceptible at first. At the end of a long day, sitting by a campfire after Chris has had one too many drinks and gone to bed, Matt casually invites Sam into his tent, a remark that could be considered a joke. Yet it becomes an inflection point for Sam—a moment during which she starts to register the way her identity as a young, attentive woman affects how she’s seen. The film’s writer-director, India Donaldson, told me she never thought of Good One, her first feature, as a typical coming-of-age project; it was more an opportunity to capture a feeling she experienced often in her teenage years and early 20s. She spent her summers backpacking with her father and grew up being labeled the “good one” in her blended family, careful to ensure peace and offer emotional support at every turn. “I was … desperately wanting to be taken seriously,” she explained. “And then the feeling when you think you’re in conversation with … someone in your life you really think is listening to you and interested in you and understanding you, and then they say or do something that just slices through all of the things … Disappointment is the feeling. And shame.”

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The result is a film that explores the emotional reality of establishing boundaries, a crucial step in the journey to adulthood, with unusual specificity. Scenes may echo coming-of-age tropes—Sam encounters hikers closer to her age, deals with her period, and argues lightly with her father—but much of the story follows Sam trying to understand what happened by the campfire. “I knew that it was not the type of movie where these people would be able to confront anything head on,” Donaldson told me. Instead, Good One shows that growing up can begin with a single conversation that illuminates, for someone like Sam, how far she has left to go.

As a pivotal but unshowy sequence, the campfire scene required fine-tuning at every stage. While writing the script, Donaldson worked toward building a moment that felt definitively odd, but never sinister or physically aggressive. While filming the scene over two nights, Donaldson asked McCarthy to vary where he looked when he spoke; the direction of his gaze changed how she as a viewer felt about Matt. And in the editing bay, she and the film’s editor examined their responses to each shot, playing with how long the camera lingered on each character’s expressions. “We definitely agonized over many details,” Donaldson explained. Frame by frame, she said, “it just came down to … What feels like the deepest gut punch?”

That meticulousness only works because the film studies Sam’s 50-something companions through the many, many conversations they have as they trek through the woods. Matt makes the kind of small talk that signals his fear of being alone with his thoughts. Chris seems unable to deliver anything in a non-passive-aggressive tone. Good One is immersive, blending natural sounds—flowing water, chirping birds, buzzing critters—into the dialogue until the men’s exchanges become a part of the soundscape to Sam, part of the “surface,” as Donaldson put it, of her experience. Both of them treat her like a kid and an adult; Chris refuses to let her drive one minute, then needs her to smooth out a problem at work for him the next, while Matt alternates between sarcastically marveling at her “wisdom” and asking for her honest opinions. Sam’s few, bemused interjections and quiet actions convey the gendered essence of her role: She cooks dinner, cleans up their campsites, and helps Matt set up his tent without being asked. The film suggests that this dynamic doesn’t bother her; she’s been conditioned to find all of this normal.

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The men’s silence in the final act, then, speaks volumes. Matt never talks again in the film after the campfire scene; Donaldson said she wanted it to seem as if, in his embarrassment, he “kind of ejects himself from the story.” Chris, meanwhile, says little but begs Sam to try to “just have a nice day” after she confides in him—a conversation Donaldson said feels more significant than the one that set off Sam’s alarm bells, because Sam finally grasps that these adults around her don’t have answers or the courage to provide them. They’ve disappointed her, yet they’re also more lost than she’d realized. “I didn’t want the audience to loathe or despise them too much,” Donaldson said, adding that Le Gros helped cut some of the additional dialogue she had initially written for Chris. “It was clear how little needed to be said to have maximum impact,” she said. “I did want to allow some space for the audience to … understand the position he’s in, how hard it is to say the right thing.”

Of course, Sam may never hear the right things. After attempting to speak with her father, she fills the men’s backpacks with rocks—a small rebellion she can play off, like Matt’s comment, as an unfunny joke—and spends time alone hiking through the woods and gazing at the scenery. Most coming-of-age films dole out tidy life lessons for their protagonists, but Good One shows the messiness of gaining perspective. By the final scene, Sam is ready to let go of her need to be the “good one,” though it’s unclear how she’ll change—or whether that’s fully possible around Chris and Matt. “In reality,” Donaldson pointed out, “she’s still who she is at the end.” But like any teenager on the brink of adulthood, she’s closer to understanding who she can become.