The adaptation trail of “Girls Like Girls” is an unusual one. In 2015, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko released her hyper-catchy pop song of the same name, bringing a plainly worded statement of lesbian desire — “girls like girls like boys do” — into the viral mainstream, with an accompanying video laying out a compacted five-minute story of two suburban teenage girls discovering that their friendship is something more. Co-directed by the singer, the clip was artfully shot and empathetically told, and got fans sufficiently invested that Kiyoko eventually published a YA novel expanding the adventures of its young lovers, Coley and Sonya. And now we come around to “Girls on Girls” the movie, a full decade after the song’s first release — several eons in pop terms, then — but just as fresh and disarming in its articulation of queer self-discovery.
Not that you need know any of this background — or indeed anything about Kiyoko — to enjoy the star’s summer-soaked feature directing debut, which tells its unavoidably familiar tale of first love, first heartbreak and lessons learned with such open-hearted emotional purity that it feels new again. Or rather, it reminds you of when such feelings were new, and overwhelmingly big, as much as those older and supposedly wiser than you tried to tell you otherwise. The film’s two superb young stars, Maya da Costa and Myra Molloy, deserve much of the credit for its gentle, relatable warmth, but so of course does Kiyoko, who emerges here as a filmmaker of considerable skill and sensitivity — clearly capable of handling other projects not rooted in her own songbook.
