Sienna Miller has never looked like anyone outside of Hollywoods idea of a Rust Belt grandmother, or a waitress slinging chili dogs at a truck-stop diner.
It takes a minute to get past the inconvenient truth of her movie-star beauty inAmerican Woman; but once you do, she gives a startlingly real and lived-in performance as Debra, a single mom whose teenage daughter, Bridget (Sky Ferreira), leaves behind her own young son one night to go meet an ex-boyfriend and never comes home.
Trailers for the filmmake it look like a fairly standard missing-person thriller, but director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) actually has something less expected in mind: the kind of slow-burn, deeply immersive character study that thrived in cinemas 1970s New Wave.
Credit: Roadside Attractions
Bridgets disappearance tears a hole in Debras world, but it also forces her, finally, to grow up left to care for a grandson who hardly knew his mother, she gropes for a new kind of stability, even as she still cant help pick fights with her family (including Amy Madigan andMad Mens Christina Hendricks) and fall for men (like Aaron Pauls Chris) who make promises they cant always keep.
As more than a decade passes on screen, the one constant is Millers presence in every scene: a messy, chain-smoking sex kitten stumbling from delayed adolescence toward a grown womanhood painful, honest, and flawed worth waiting for.B+
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