A nurse (Laurie Metcalf) and her 17-year-old daughter (Saoirse Ronan) cruise down a highway. Theyre listening to an audiobook reciting the closing passage from The Grapes of Wrath, tears trickling from their eyes in unison. Its like Sleepless in Seattle, when Meg Ryan and Rosie ODonnell sob as they watch An Affair to Remember, except here the sentiment is short-lived.

As quickly as the Steinbeck novel ends, attention shifts to the girls desire to flee California for an East Coast college. The mood drops. An argument clearly one theyve had before breaks out. The way you work, or the way you dont work, youre not even worth state tuition, the mother barks. Her daughter yanks the car door open and threatens to hurl herself out of it. The spell is severed. The waterworks have dried. They resume their natural roles: testy teenager and pinched parent.

This exchange is the perfect introduction to Lady Bird , the solo directorial debut from Greta Gerwig , high priestess of staccato speech and translucent soul-searching relative to both Millennials and Gen Xers. (Gerwigs first directing project was the 2008 mumblecore drama Nights and Weekends, made with Joe Swanberg.) Across a dulcet 93 minutes, Lady Bird a movie youll wish existed when you were a teen captures the ever-ebbing and ever-flowing current that is maturity. An adolescent thinks shes mastered it all; an adult realizes maybe she still hasnt. Residing under the same middle-class roof, where one worries about schoolyard popularity and the other frets over hefty grocery bills, they foster a familiar acrimony thats as fleeting as it is forceful. They just cant resist giving each other a hard time.