Weekend Watch: ‘Princess Cyd’ Is a Breath of Kind, Generous Air in Awful Times

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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: Princess Cyd
Director: Stephen Cone
Starring: Jessie Pinnick, Rebecca Spence, Malic White, Tyler Ross
Available on: Amazon Video and iTunes

There is a delight that I find when my expectations are upended by a movie. When the circumstances that present themselves one way get resolved differently than I have come to expect them to be by countless other films and TV shows. We’ve all been marinating in stories like these for our entire lives, and we develop a kind of sixth sense for how they will go. When a movie shows you something different, it’s shaking you awake, in a way.

That’s how I felt when I first saw writer/director Stephen Cone’s 2012 film The Wise Kids. It’s the story of a trio of small-town teenagers about to graduate high school and enter the world. The boy is gay, one of the girls is breaking away from her Christian faith, and the other girl is dealing with the pain of being left behind. And while we’re not exactly drowning in stories about gay teens (or questions of faith, for that matter), I’d still been conditioned to expect certain things: emotional arc and easily identifiable villains and pathways from repression to enlightenment. The Wise Kids gets you there, but it takes the scenic route, and along the way, you experience how an entire community shapes and is shaped by its children. Matters of sexuality and identity are handled with sensitivity and realistic tension; matters of faith and the ways that religion binds communities together are handled with uncommon nuance. It’s a brilliant film and so characteristic of Cone’s other work. His follow-up, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, worked a similar alchemy, weaving in and out and around intergenerational communities and their stories and frictions, without easy villains to demonize.

Cone’s latest film, the sweet and quietly hopeful Princess Cyd, feels like the perfect capper to a trilogy, then. It deals with many of the same themes — sexuality, family, the different and unexpected ways that different generations reflect upon each other — while moving them into a new setting. Rather than the small, interconnected towns of Wise Kids and Henry Gamble, Princess Cyd follows its main character, a teenage girl named Cyd whose single father sends her to go stay with her aunt Miranda in Chicago for a few weeks. Cyd and her dad have been having some friction, and a scene at the top of the movie suggests that their family has some trauma in their past. But Cyd is a pretty well-adjusted teen, as far as movie teens go. She plays soccer; she’s friendly and open; this isn’t the standard sullen teen sent to live with a relative who spends the first hour being shitty and sulking in their room.

Cyd and Miranda don’t know each other super well at the film’s outset. We’re told that Cyd hasn’t been to Miranda’s home — her mother’s childhood home — since she was a child. Miranda is an author, and everything about her seems bookish. Not dowdy, but that kind of minor-key artistic where she wears a lot of scarves and meets with friends to consult about the books they’re working on. Her wifi network is “RalphWaldo” and the password is “Hawthorne1850.” She points Cyd towards a spot in the house that makes for a good reading nook, but Cyd just flashes an appreciative smile and says, “I don’t really like to read.” And we’re off!

Rebecca Spence gets to such a specific place in the role of Miranda. She’s genuinely kind and she loves her niece, but she’s also threatened by her in ways she’s not ready to admit to herself. Threatened in the way we all can be by the generations that come after us. Cyd is young and full of opinions — the kind of opinions that teenagers develop on the spot and have full, heedless confidence in. We’ve spent decades trying to build confidence in our young people without grappling with the fact that a confident teen just might be the scariest thing on the face of the Earth. Meanwhile, here’s Miranda: she’s single; she’s a successful enough author that strangers sometimes approach her at restaurants but not so successful that she’s not acutely aware of the printed word’s waning popularity; she values her faith in a way that many people don’t or can’t appreciate.

Cyd, meanwhile, might not even realize how much she’s challenging her aunt’s worldview just by being in it. She’s bright and sweet and is open to a whole bunch of what Chicago is offering to her. Newcomer Jessie Pinnick is a find as an actress, and her performance could not feel more relaxed or less mannered. Cyd lights up a room with her smile but her demeanor is constantly curious and even restless about exploring this world that keeps opening up for her. Miranda welcomes her into her social circle: academics and authors across a spectrum of ages and sexual orientations and racial backgrounds. This could feel ostentatious or self-consciously liberal if you a) have never experienced the social circles of academics, or b) are unfamiliar with the way Cone is always creating these familial communities, no matter their politics nor proximity to urban centers of art and culture. But while the communities in The Wise Kids and Henry Gamble are the platforms from which their young characters launch themselves, Miranda’s friends and colleagues represent the kind of soft ground where Cyd might soon land.

Pinnick and Spence bounce off of each other so deftly, each provoking the other almost unconsciously. To call what happens when the two finally have their confrontation a “boiling-over” feels inaccurate, but Spence does give a monologue (at the kitchen sink, no less) that is a marvel of unloading a character’s entire worldview without ever coming close to going overboard. They’re the non-romantic acting duo of the year, all apologies to Tom and Meryl in The Post.

Cyd does find romance elsewhere, in a sweet, sexy encounter with Katie, a local barista who presents Cyd with a door into a new and different version of herself. Throughout the movie, and sometimes literally, Cyd is trying on these myriad ways of expressing herself. None of it feels external, either. Cone does a beautiful job of connecting to that time in our lives when who we are on the inside could look and feel like so many different things on the outside, and it’s a thrill to watch Cyd step into so many of them.

Ultimately, Princess Cyd is another gorgeous, sweetly sensitive vision of the ways in which family, however defined, can bring us closer to the people we want to be. That friction between the generations can be loving even while it’s quietly combative. That coming out can be freeing. I’m not sure if Cone’s movies represent a better world than the one we have or just works harder to find what’s better about the world we’re already in. I just know it’s a balm and a pleasure to be able to exist in them for as long as I can.

Where to stream Princess Cyd

Where to stream The Wise Kids

Where to stream Henry Gamble's Birthday Party