Good Girl Jane Review: The Vulnerability of Teen-hood

Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s Good Girl Jane is buoyed by its central performance, but it doesn’t engage with its myriad of themes enough to satisfy.

It’s a story that does veer into cliché and feeling a little spread thin at times, but is anchored by a really sensitive central performance and never loses sight of Jane’s vulnerability.

Freshly transferred from another school thanks to some pretty intense bullying, Jane (Rain Spencer, of The Summer I Turned Pretty) is struggling to fit in. She’s lonely and isolated, ignored by her younger sister Izzie (Eloisa Huggins) at school and harassed by faceless cyberbullies at home. Desperate for connection, Jane clings to hard-partying peers Benji (Diego Chiat) and Bailey (Odessa A’zion, of Hellraiser) when they offer a tentative – if flimsy – offer of friendship. But when she falls hard for their older meth dealer Jamie (Patrick Gibson, of Shadow and Bone), things start to spiral out of control.

Good Girl Jane doesn’t completely avoid the clichés of wayward teen drama. There’s a messy divorced parents situation, with a somewhat carelessly callous mother (Andie MacDowell, of Red Right Hand) and a caring but unreliable father (Gale Harold). There’s the love-bombing bad boy who sweeps Jane off her feet and takes advantage of her. There’s drugs, sex, bullying and the deep, heart-breaking pit of loneliness and angst that, pretty universally, colours the teenage experience.

Mintz engages with all of these meaty topics with gusto; unfortunately, the film never feels like it delves any deeper than surface level with any of them. Good Girl Jane feels jagged and undercooked, a bit too forced ‘cool’ for it to feel completely authentic, and it simultaneously drags in the middle and wraps things up a little too abruptly.

There’s a poignant moment of connection between Jane and her mother, as well as a significant resolution between Jane and Izzie, but it still feels like there are a few more emotionally charged scenes missing. The central relationship between Jane and Jamie is intense – with Jake Saner’s camera almost invasively close during their most intimate moments – but honestly a little baffling. (Although perhaps that’s the ‘adult hindsight’ talking.) It’s clearly a case of Jane clinging too hard to the first person to seek out a connection with her, giving her the attention she is so desperate for. And it’s also clearly a case of her teenage naivety falling victim to an older boy’s penchant for taking advantage. But from an audience perspective, it’s never anything except off-putting, which makes it a struggle to fully emotionally engage with it from a narrative standpoint.

Spencer gives a really engaging performance though, elevating almost all of the film’s flaws to a point that, for the right audience,  it might get away with them. She’s compelling, committed and heartbreakingly naïve, sad and lonely. The film doesn’t ever let you forget how vulnerable Jane is, and Spencer’s physicality projects it constantly, so it’s easy to invest in her well-being, even if everyone around her is near insufferable and the narrative gets a little too thin.

Good Girl Jane is anchored and buoyed by Spencer, but doesn’t escape the trappings of coming-of-age cliché and a narrative that’s simultaneously too full and too shallow. Mintz’s direction is sensitive, and the film manages to be raw, poignant and slick with its stylistic choices, but ultimately it feels like a film that some might relate to, but most will be frustrated at. 

Good Girl Jane is now available to watch on digital and on demand.

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