Coast

Directed by Jessica Hester and Derek Schweickart, Coast follows rebellious teen Abby Evans (Fátima Ptacek) as she’s forced to make a series of life-changing decisions over the course of a few weeks. Filmmakers Hester and Schweickart, working from Cindy Kitagawa’s screenplay, deliver a fairly conventional coming-of-age story that remains unable to wholeheartedly capture and sustain the viewer’s interest from beginning to end, as the movie, which runs a palpably overlong 102 minutes, progresses through a busy, bursting-at-the-seams narrative that’s been suffused with many of the genre’s hoariest clichés and conventions (eg Abby meets and falls for a sensitive musician, Abby forms a connection with her off-beat teacher, etc). It’s clear, then, that Coast‘s relatively tolerable atmosphere is due to its smattering of compelling sequences and almost uniformly top-notch performances, with, in terms of the latter, Ptacek’s appealing, down-to-earth turn as the restless protagonist ensuring that the movie does, at the very least least, feel somewhat authentic. The absence of forward momentum, which grows more and more problematic as time progresses, paves the way for a second half that isn’t remotely as impactful as Hester and Schweickart have intended, however, and there’s little doubt that the picture fizzles out long before it arrives at its admittedly affecting final few minutes – which ultimately cements Coast‘s place as a well-intentioned misfire that could’ve benefited from some serious streamlining.

** out of ****