Parents' Guide to The Girl from Plainville

Elle Fanning, Colton Ryan, and Chloe Sevigny elevate a story that read tawdry in social media headlines but emerges here as a sensitive portrait of two teens who encouraged each other's worst impulses. On-screen, as in life, Michelle and Conrad meet in person only a few times after striking up a quick attraction while on separate family vacations in Florida. But in the scenes where they're together, the two have intense chemistry, and we can see and feel the relief both take in finding someone like-minded at last, someone too weird to fit in with the kids at school but who longs for a connection; someone, anyone, to care.

The pair's relationship was mostly conducted over text, which can be hard to visualize. The Girl from Plainville wisely takes the tack of having a vision of Michelle show up wherever Conrad happens to be while the two are texting, often clad in the baggy pink T-shirt she wore one of the few times he saw her, carrying on intense conversations about life, and love, and the way other people disappoint them. These scenes are interspersed with moments from Michelle and Conrad's lives, and with the timeline of events after Conrad's death, when Michelle weirdly inserts herself into the Roy family's grieving even as detectives gather evidence of her part in the suicide. It all comes off as affecting even as the case itself is sensational -- a surprisingly nuanced take on a terribly public tragedy.