20th Century Women

20th Century Women (2016) is Mike Mills' drama you can watch online on iFILM. Santa Barbara, 1979. Dorothea is a single mother in her mid-fifties raising teenage Jamie on her own, and she's quietly decided she can't finish the job alone.

So she recruits two younger women to help shape him into a good man. Abbie is a red-haired punk photographer renting a room in their rambling old house; Julie is the sharp teenage neighbor Jamie aches for and can't have. What comes out of it isn't really parenting — it's a loose, candid conversation across three generations about feminism, sex, mortality, and the Talking Heads. Annette Bening holds the whole thing together as Dorothea, with Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, and Billy Crudup around her.

Mills based the script on his own boyhood and his mother, and it landed an Oscar nomination for original screenplay. This is a quiet, talky film with almost no plot machinery; it lives on tone and observation rather than incident. Reach for it if you love warm character pieces in the vein of Lady Bird. Stream 20th Century Women (2016) online on iFILM.