Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is ready to leave Sacramento, California behind. She’s in her senior year of high school and she wants nothing more than to leave the west coast. New York City is her goal, so applying to schools is the start of her escape plan. Lady Bird is very sure of herself but as the year goes on, she experiences a world of changes. The Lady Bird at the start of the movie is a different woman from the one at the end.

Coming of age movies are one of my favorites and Lady Bird is one of the best I’ve seen in a while. Saoirse Ronan is a tremendous actor and she brings the conflicted Lady Bird to life. A concoction of dreams, fears, low-self esteem, regret, loyalty, angst, and anger are constantly mixing together in her mind. She’s a sweet girl who’s sure she knows what she wants (in leaving home at least) and inadvertently steps on a lot of toes in the process. Her greatest flaw is probably when she acts without thinking of anyone but herself. She says things to others as a joke and when it blows back onto her, she has to scramble to apologize. She also lies a lot in order to fit in with others, who she thinks she wants to be like the most. That brings her trouble too.

Lady Bird is a great character as she is believably flawed. She’s not a bad person, she just often sticks her foot into her mouth. As a teenager, she thinks she knows everything, what’s right for her at every turn but in reality, she has a lot of growing up to do. Her father is a teddy bear of a human being where her mother is the authority. Laurie Metcalf is another tremendous actor and her chemistry with Saoirse is largely why the movie works so well Lady Bird’s best friend Julie is also a very important part of the story, like the footbridge between adult and childhood. Lady Bird constantly butts heads with her mother, mostly being catty to each other but thee are a few instances where things get real and they have it out. Her mother is a hard ass for sure, she can be overbearing to the point of suffocation, but Lady Bird does need someone to call her out on her nonsense when it flares up.

While a lot happens in the movie (romantic relationships, social climbing, applying to colleges) the story revolves around how Lady Bird sees herself and wants to become much more. Growing up in a lower income home skews her perspective. She lives next door to a much more affluent part of town, goes to school with kids from that area, and she wants nothing more than to live that life that she’s convinced is better in every way. Much of her motivation to leave home comes from this, she’s ashamed of where she’s from and how her family lives.

Lady Bird lies to try and get a leg up and fit in, dumps her best friend to hang out with the cool kids, dates the popular boy and finds out that’s not what she expected at all. She is at the pivotal time where she’s finding out who she is and what she stands for. Her future is totally up in the air and for the first time, she’s becoming aware that all the decisions she makes now have big repercussions. She also comes to realize that her home and her family–what she’s “ashamed” of–is way more valuable than she realized.

It’s Lady Bird’s relationships with others that I found the most compelling and enduring. How she acts and handles each group: her parents, her adopted brother and his girlfriend, her boyfriends, her new best friend Jenna, and her true ride or die friend, Julie. It’s these relationships that I thought of the most once the credits rolled. The end is pretty abrupt when it happens but I think it’s the perfect choice on reflection.

We get to follow Lady Bird through the most important year of her young life so far. We know her goal right from the start and the question is always will she be able to do it? She goes through a lot in that year, we blast through it in about 90 minutes and more than just her life changes in that time. It’s not a total metamorphosis of course, as a year can contain only so much. For example, she makes a stupid decision when she’s arguing with her mother in the car in the first scene and at the end, she makes another painful mistake. But she’s learning. When the movie cuts from Lady Bird that final time, her journey for that part of her life is over. Everything after that is brand new territory.