COURTESY OF APPLE TV+
From the moment Lennie’s (Grace Kaufman) horrid opening voiceover begins, The Sky Is Everywhere might introduce you to an inner-hatred you didn’t know was possible. We can talk a lot about the get-rich-quick scheme that is YA literature, and we can reasonably discuss whatever virtues are hidden away in such lines as, “I don’t want to live in fear, I want to live in life.” Regardless, if you make it through The Sky Is Everywhere from Apple TV+, don’t be surprised if banning movies forever suddenly seems like a great plan.
Here find your typical YA horse fodder wherein the youths are more connected to culture and reality than the quirky hippie adults who smoke too much weed and are somehow in charge. Will Smith was right—parents just don’t understand. These teenagers obsess over English literature, classical music and Catholic saints for some reason. Why? In this obviously faux world, Lennie tries to get over her sister’s shocking death, and director Josephine Decker beats us over the head with this setup again and again and again and again: Lennie is sad, but Lennie wants to kiss a boy real bad. Maybe it’ll be her dead sister’s boyfriend (Pico Alexander), or maybe it’ll be musical fuckboi Joe (Jacques Colimon)? Who knows, but Lennie screams a lot, runs away into the woods a lot, writes poetry on leaves a lot and somehow feels better. Rinse-repeat-rinse-repeat-rinse-repeat.
Even tweens and teens will likely feel like this is some condescending nonsense, for Sky is a laboriously inauthentic film in its own emotions and, perhaps, in how it conveys human emotions as a whole. This feel-hard flick exists in a cupcake frosting-colored palate with cartoon slide whistles, silly sound effects and, most perplexingly, cartoon springy sounds to signify male erections. The dialogue is so putrid your employer can’t blame you for calling in sick the next day. Why is sad Lennie so desirable? Because she’s there, of course. Elsewhere, the cinematography reads like a Looney Tunes vignette that somehow believes itself Amélie, but aesthetic surrealism is meaningless when there’s no soul to justify its eccentricities. If only this vapid middle class dreamsicle could be the last of the young adult book adaptations that haunt us. Our luck won’t be so grand, will it?
2
+ You can turn it off
- Inauthentic, ugly, worthy of destruction
The Sky Is Everywhere
Directed by Josephine Decker
With Kaufman, Jacques Colimon, Cherry Jones and Jason Segel
Apple TV+, NR , 103 min
