A teenage boy’s infatuation with a woman he sees on the bus further complicates his already tumultuous adolescence.
The indie drama follows Howie Sheffield (Brendan Meyer), a teenager who’s silently in love with an anonymous woman (Jemima Kirke) he often sees on his bus ride to school in New York City. While he navigates life at home and his parents’ (Molly Ringwald, Brian d’Arcy James) crumbling marriage, Howie pursues the woman, while a girl at school (Harley Quinn Smith) timidly pursues him. As teased in the trailer — which EW exclusively debuts above — Moments weaves several storylines together, presenting universal experiences through a micro lens.
“Not all the storylines connect directly, but there’s a connecting theme,” Ringwald tells EW. “It’s really what the title says: It’s all these small moments that make up a life. It’s all the minutiae. To me, it’s very much like real life.”
That sense of authenticity in the short, dialogue-light scenes is one of the film’s driving forces. And although the protagonist is male, Ringwald notes that Moments is deeply engaged with women’s experiences.
“It’s interesting how it worked out, that the film shows a woman in crisis at different times in a life,” Ringwald says, referring not only to her character, Carla, a middle-aged mother who’s stuck in an unhappy marriage, but also to Kirke’s Odessa, a thirtysomething who’s feeling lost after a divorce, and Smith’s Lindsay, a teen girl trying to shake an ugly rumor and build a new friendship. “I don’t know if that’s because I play Carla or because I’m a woman, but I really do feel like it examines these women and the issues they have at different stages.”
Directed By: Melissa Miller Costanzo
In theatres January 17, 2019
