‘Janet Planet’ Review: A Sticky Summer Full of Small Dramas

Kids are supposed to love summer, but I can’t be alone in remembering it as the most vexing season. It’s hot, and there are mosquitoes and spasms of allergic sneezes, and the predictable, sociable structure of the school year vanishes for what feels like an interminable stretch. When Lacy, the 11-year-old in the playwright Annie Baker’s brilliant “Janet Planet,” calls home from camp to tell her mother, Janet, that if she doesn’t come pick her up, she’ll kill herself — I got that, in all its hyperbolic provocation. Sometimes summer is just the worst.

But being 11 is also the worst. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks Janet (Julianne Nicholson) a few weeks later, when she’s been brought back to the home the two share in western Massachusetts: “Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet doesn’t want to laugh, and gently corrects her. But she’s also in the throes of her own turmoil, so she gets it. “I don’t think it will last, though,” Lacy continues, acknowledging with tween stoicism her spells of hell and happiness.

Lacy’s life is not hell, no matter her solemn belief. Her mother has built a good life for the two of them, even if it’s invaded at times by friends who need help and boyfriends who Lacy knows are bad news. But every day is long and every occurrence is amplified when you’re Lacy’s age. The genius of “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut as a feature writer-director, is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. You can hear the buzzing bug zapper, feel the sunburn on your skin, scratch your knees on the freshly cut grass and sink into the hazy evening ennui.

Baker, who grew up in Amherst, knows the texture of those Massachusetts summers by heart. She also knows the kinds of people who populate the area, sending Janet and Lacy at one point to a midsummer mystical theatrical presentation, complete with larger-than-life puppetry, after which everyone is implored to take home all the extra zucchini the group grew by accident. “Janet Planet” is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.

The film is divided into three big sections, centering on three adults who show up in Janet’s life, and thus Lacy’s, in the summer of 1991. First there’s Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend, who was expecting to have the summer alone with her. Later, there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who needs a place to stay after leaving a group that’s part commune, part theater troupe and maybe part cult. Finally, there’s the leader of that group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who takes an interest in Janet and her spiritual development.