A coming-of-ager set in 2006. Which means what? iPods and computers with big chunky displays. AOL Messenger. And Zach Braff! All are here in Girls Like Girls, Hayley Kiyoko’s feature debut, which was a song, a music video and a book before it became a film. Work that IP.
Though not in it much, Braff embodies that time almost like no one else – he’d been in the wispy, troubled-dude dramedy Garden State in 2004 and was midway through his run on Scrubs. He’s really just a flavour bomb this time around, here to remind us what it was all like back then. The focus is actually on teenager Coley (Maya da Costa), a shy newbie in town who is taken under the wing of the exuberant and hot Sonya (Myra Molloy). Braff, meanwhile, hangs around on the sidelines, playing Coley’s estranged father, trying to connect with her after her mother’s death has forced her to move in with him.
Kiyoko gets things off to a cheeky start with what would typically be described as a male-gaze shot down Coley’s cleavage, before throwing Coley and Sonya together in a coffee shop, where Coley is instantly smitten by this force of nature and it immediately becomes apparent that Sonya is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl – another regular in films from the first decade of this millennium.
Manic Pixie Dream Girls are usually catalytic converters designed to give the wafty, mopey, passive (usually) male hero a kick in the right direction. But what if the hero is female and a lesbian, and her Dream Girl has a boyfriend, Trenton (Levon Hawke, another of the Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman progeny)? Maybe the boyfriend doesn’t mean that much to Sonya. Maybe she might start to develop the sort of feelings for Coley that Coley has for her. Kiyoko plays peekaboo with these possibilities while Coley and Sonya get to know each other in montage sequences that are ambiguity on stilts – Coley and Sonya have sleepovers and apply each other’s nail polish and do all the girlie stuff. Trenton, meanwhile, huffs and puffs, wondering why the spotlight is no longer on him. What are Sonya and Coley getting up to in all that time they spend together?
If it sound like I’m mocking, I slightly am, but it’s a lovely, gentle and, yes, fragrant film, a lipstick-lesbian romance about pretty young women served up with a giggle and a soundtrack by Jessica Rose Weiss that’s soft and gentle, warm and breathy, as is the occasional song by Kiyoko.
Girl wins girl, girl loses girl. Sonya and Coley hit a bump in the road, which forces Coley to take stock and to stand on her own two feet. So there is development, for Coley at least (Sonya, like all catalysts, doesn’t develop). The film’s biggest plus is that it’s honest, not snide, and refuses to work its will they/won’t they into an issue about sexuality. This is a story predominantly about someone’s fragile emotions rather than a political screed or a plea for tolerance.
In many respects a traditional coming-of-ager – there’s sun in the lens and parties where jocks drink too much – its set-up is probably too fast and its waystations too obvious, and yet its honesty and directness go a long way to compensate.
Clearly this isn’t a film for an ageing male like me and yet I admired its sincerity. After it was done I went and watched the music video that inspired it. And there were Coley, Sonya and Trenton all over again, played by different actors but telling the same story, of lovely, pretty young women who’d like to be together and a boorish male as the dog in the manger.
Girls Like Girls – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
