All This Panic

All This Panic

No matter how far removed you are from your teenage years those agony-filled epochal days when the world is both your oyster and your tormentor you probably remember one thing about it: Time never passes as slowly as it does back then. The days were longer, the school year couldn’t end soon enough, summer took forever to come. Every scene of Jenny Gage’s deep, shrewd and beautifully realized documentary “All This Panic” is plugged into that in the moment feeling that accompanies a group of young women (and this movie only follows Brooklynites) over three years. No wonder its lean, 79-minute running time is not a liability; Gage makes every minute count.

“All This Panic” began when Gage, making her feature debut as director (her husband, Tom Betterton, also shot the film), met Ginger and Dusty, two teenage sisters living in the same Clinton Hill neighborhood. After getting to know them and watching their lives unfold for a little while longer, they found themselves spending time with more of Ginger’s friends among them Lena, perhaps the strongest voice within this group and certainly within the documentary. An aspiring philosopher with family troubles aplenty (she discovered casually one day during a family viewing of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” that her parents were splitting up), Lena is seen walking around New York City alone at night more than once in this movie. She has much to say.

We meet Sage early on too; she attends an elite private-school downtown Manhattan and is smart enough to let you know it without quite firing it at you like a weapon. Raised by her single mother with whom she shares an obviously close relationship (they’re shown sitting on their couch together on multiple occasions watching TV), Sage seems wiser than most of what surrounds her but also very clearly still figuring things out herself. We hear most often from her about boys and sex; she’s the film’s unashamed feminist voice, complaining wisely, gently but also without much caution about how girls are ruthlessly categorized in society even as they’re being constantly told that they can do anything and be anyone. Near the movie’s end, she delivers a monologue about her hair.

Olivia is the other one who gets quieted by this movie; initially a little harder to get a handle on than the rest of these kids (she was so quiet that I had assumed she was still waiting for puberty to hit when Gage told me after the screening that Olivia actually turned 21 during production), she lights up somewhere in here with her own line about knowing things (specifically sex) about herself but not quite telling anyone close just yet. She has such kind eyes; you hope whoever needs to know will find out soon enough.

And then there are Delia and Ivy, two more of Ginger’s best friends (if you were counting: yes, there are three). Delia seems like someone who might hate “all this panic” with regard to high school; when we first meet her, she sits quietly while Ivy flips through racks of clothes at some store or another, trying feverishly on each top or jacket or whatever before piling back into an Uber and going home. Ivy has plans, though: She talks early on about wanting to go to museums alone and see what happens. Good luck finding another kid any age who speaks this way.

“All This Panic,” a neatly assembled documentary whose cinematography impressed me more each time I watched it (the score is also killer), follows these kids mostly individually over three years as they go through various stages of self-awareness and self-presentation. There isn’t really a central conflict here other than growing up itself; Ginger and Sage eventually drift apart because people do that sometimes, and Lena gets into NYU without ever explicitly saying that she got into NYU. Most of what happens in this movie which, yes, eventually includes pot-smoking and tearful breakups and parents angrily storming out of therapists’ offices feels almost eerily incidental to the kids themselves. It’s just life; it’s just time.

The three-year filming method on the girls may inevitably recall Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood,’ a fictional life story of a Texan boy told over a 12-year period using the same actors throughout. But this isn’t quite like Linklater’s narrative feat however, since the girls’ development in front of the camera from hair dye jobs and changing ideals to growing frustrations is organic; Gage and Betterton simply watch, lovingly.

If anything, the slightness of “All This Panic” in its passage of time stuff, its lack of pretension between friends, its overall fuzziness clotting around seven teenagers’ collective angst at loosely here and now then this and that then some other point might most closely resemble David Robert Mitchell’s recent-ish, under-seen “The Myth of the American Sleepover,” another narrative set during one summer night that also deals with teenage anxieties. We watch as sexualities bud, personalities bloom and get between old pals, curiosities spark along in this odd coming of age film, smoothed together gently.

In their photography background shown luxuriously throughout ‘All This Panic’, Gage and Betterton present their shots like artists would paint them. In an early scene that takes place on a picturesque beach where Dusty and Lena have a conversation-and-quarrel, shot with artistic framing that lends it melancholy; this is only one incident among many.

They are just as disciplined when faced with less appealing environs though: brick walls become beautiful creative choices made on purpose rather than obligatory backdrops; so do cramped interiors or rundown roofs. And what they end up with is both meaningful and beautiful in its struck through with mystery ness at teens years way: something full of hope that knows no bounds.

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