Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane and ChloÎ Grace Moretz in The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Jeong Park)

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival has served up exciting offerings, almost half by women directors.  It’s hard to get a bead on such a big event—the event can be overwhelming, with hundreds of films on view. American life comes under uncomfortable scrutiny in some of them, but fortunately, the emphasis is on nuance and solid storytelling more than polemics.

Lemonade

Ioana Uricaru’s tense Lemonade is translated from the original Romanian title Luna de Miere, meaning honeymoon, a bitterly ironic name for the lead character’s predicament.  Wide-eyed Romanian nurse Mara (Malina Manovici) has married an American who is disabled and brought her young son to the United States with the aim of finally getting her green card. Should be simple, right? Except Mara finds herself careening through a featureless yet ominous exurb and plunged into a nightmare of lies, blackmail, and corruption. The place she’s trying so hard to make her home sees her as an interloper and has no idea who she is—one cop even asks her if Romanian is a European language.

Manovici conveys Mara’s fear, but Steve Bacic rivets viewers’ attention as an immigration officer who starts off as a straitlaced bureaucratic type and turns into someone much more dangerous. His character embodies how low a promised land can go and still attract the desperate. As he and one of Mara’s allies both tell her, “Even people who hate America want to come here.”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

A movie about 1990s gay teenagers finding themselves, Desiree Akhavan’s Miseducation of Cameron Post avoids teenage-movie pitfalls with a richer range of emotion than most YA-to-screen adaptations usually serve up, along with hotter and more authentically awkward sex scenes. Winsome Chloë Grace Moretz plays the title character, who gets caught making out with her girlfriend in a car at the high school prom. She’s then flung by her relatives into the remote God’s Promise camp for a thorough Christian deprogramming.

In the wilderness, Cameron encounters a righteous headmistress (Jennifer Ehle), a wild-eyed bunkmate (Emily Skeggs), and a cynical co-conspirator (Sasha Lane of American Honey). At this point, Cameron’s story widens into an ensemble piece, and the film deftly lets scenes play out unexpectedly, allowing characters—and actors—to yield small, telling surprises. Moretz is on-point as a character trying to take the path of least resistance while maintaining her dignity in a coercive setting. Miseducation rations droll humor and erupts into crisis, but it’s the film’s sincerity that really stands out.

(The Miseducation of Cameron Post will be released on August 3.)

Nico, 1988

Discovered by Andy Warhol and thrust into the front-woman position for the Velvet Underground, German beauty Nico (née Christa Päffgen) transfixed audiences with her unsetting vocals and icy good looks. But the former model fell a long way after her 1960s heyday. The 1995 documentary Nico Icon and a damning book by one of her ex-bandmates portrayed her as ghostly, mumbling wreck by the 1980s.

So Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988 biopic may deserve a mild slap on the wrist for its portrayal of Nico as a much more vital character. Trine Dyrholm, too hale and hearty by far, turns the hopeless junkie into a sort of independent, droll, and grumpy survivor crossed with Chrissie Hynde.

That said, Nico, 1988 will draw you in once you get used to the shift in persona. Dyrholm makes the new Nico her own, tossing out ill-tempered quips in style. Being around Nico is not easy, and her long-suffering manager and ragtag band members have their own intrigues to hash out. The actors hit subtle notes as squabbles and misunderstandings mount. Musical interludes grind and clank eerily, with “My Heart Is Empty” delivering a harsh climax. Also, the production design perfectly evokes the Euro tour circuit of 30 years ago, with its forlorn squats, scabby nightclubs, and bleary-eyed, chain-smoking patrons. True to their own perverse outlaw code, Nico and her entourage could get under your skin.

(Nico, 1988 will be released on August 1.)

The Great Pretender

More modern misfits and another reckless femme fatale roam the hipster streets of Nathan Silver’s The Great Pretender. Beautiful, haughty and tres française playwright Mona (Maëlle Poesy-Guichard) manipulates everyone around her, inveigling boozy brawler Nick (Linas Phillips) into leaving his wife and child for her. Meanwhile, she pulls the strings of two actors in her play:  Chris (Keith Poulson), a sad sack who tries to get out of jams by making “a puppy-dog face” he mistakenly thinks is endearing, and Therese (Esther Garrel), a loopy French would-be seductress whose own mother thinks she’s a complete idiote.

The story line shifts points of view nimbly, with different voice-overs leading journeys that cross and overlap back and forth in time; all characters reveal a truly excruciating—and comic—lack of self-awareness. Scenes in Mona’s play echo scenes in real life.  Other bits send up would-be bohemians and their silly pretensions. Hectic, gauzy camerawork seems to mimic the hangovers the gang racks up as they get drunk, fib, and knowingly spread STDs. Somehow by magic, Silver makes his losers loveable and their stories touching and very funny.

A scene from Roll Red Roll (Tribeca Film Festival)

Roll Red Roll

How do you cover up a heinous crime when you’ve tweeted and posted it all over social media?  Nancy Schwartzman’s compelling documentary Roll Red Roll covers a sexual assault in the depressed Rust Belt community of Steubenville, OH. Along the way, it opens up three contemporary issues: the relatively new practice of unwisely documenting actions on Twitter; conditions in left-behind, have-not America; and the early stirring of the #MeToo movement.

Steubenville’s high school football stars raped one of their teenage classmates one August night in 2012 at a series of drunken parties, putting gloating photos, tweets, and videos of the event all over every available platform. But in a football-mad community, would the powerful rally around to protect the team? Filmmakers interview police detectives who caught the boys repeatedly lying on tape. They also hear from crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, who gathered and shared the social media that led to the story’s blowing up and going national.  The amount of incriminating evidence was truly mind-boggling; so, too, the film implies, was the town’s denial that the boys had done anything wrong. Although the story is complex and filmmakers could not include its every detail, they leave us with the sense of justice not fully done.

Duck Butter

Two young women meet and decide to spend a sort of 9 1/2 Weeks coupling together, minus the sadism, with the sex performed once every 60 minutes for 24 hours. It’s an intriguing premise, but low energy and aimlessness deflate the idea in Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter. Alia Shawkat plays Naima, an actress in a Duplass brothers film (the Duplasses appear as nerdy, passive-aggressive versions of themselves). When her failure to click with the brothers leads to Naima’s getting fired, she enters an instant liaison with Sergio (Laia Costa), a flirty Spanish singer she just met at a local Los Angeles bar.

The marathon one-night stand that unfolds is fitfully sexy, amusing, and intimate. Unfortunately, it’s also claustrophobic, listless, and superficial. Scenes don’t build. Dialogue lets the self-obsessed characters act out but reveal little, so we don’t get to really know who these women are. The film runs through trending cinema tricks—toilet humor and playing awkwardness for nervous laughs—that feel overused at this stage. Luckily the actresses are always compelling to watch, particularly Shawkat, who shows glimpses of a troubled mind working beyond her shallow lines. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s original indie-rock score helpfully pitches in to give the story much-needed structure and momentum.

(Duck Butter opened in theaters Friday, April 27.)

When She Runs

Press materials portray the story of a young woman training for the Olympics as a cry from the voiceless, an underdog’s last attempt to escape stifling small-town life and break free. But directors Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck keep their main character’s emotions mostly tamped down so that the audience can’t see them. So in long take after long take, When She Runs plods when it needs to sprint.

Nonprofessional actor Kirstin Anderson plays aspiring Olympian Kirstin, throwing herself into grueling workouts and explaining her austere workout breakfast in a monotone to her roommate. Kirstin is estranged from her husband, who takes care of their son so she can train. Her argument with him is the film’s most intense moment. Otherwise, the movie reveals little of her interior life as she soaks her legs in an icy bathtub, drives around in her car listening to motivational speeches, and rescues a lost dog. A taciturn female heroine could be refreshing after the caterwaulers of Duck Butter, but Kirstin just seems depressed.

One awful night tests Kirstin’s resolve, but it doesn’t seem to have much of an impact; we leave the young woman with a victory that doesn’t really feel much like a win. The movie leaves you shut out by its closed-off main character, a runner who never really soars.