Lick the Star

Lick the Star (1998) is Sofia Coppola's debut short film — watch it online on iFILM. Fourteen minutes, black and white, made two years before The Virgin Suicides. The sensibility is already hers: the quiet cruelty of adolescent social hierarchies, observed without verdict.

Kate returns to high school after a week away nursing a broken foot. Her clique has been busy. A plan called "Lick the Star" is already in motion — secretive, escalating, and harder to read than it first appears. The film doesn't explain itself; it trusts you to feel the atmosphere instead.

As a piece of cinema history it's worth the runtime alone. Coppola frames teenage girls as people with interior lives, not spectacles. You can see the DNA of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette in the framing, the silences, the refusal to editorialize. Stream Lick the Star (1998) on iFILM.