The Sky Is Everywhere Review: A Beautifully Showy Depiction of the Teenage Spirit

Adapted by Jandy Nelson from her own 2010 novel of the same name, Josephine Decker’s The Sky Is Everywhere centers on high school music prodigy Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman) and her explosive teenage emotions. Some of those emotions are amplified by her position as the focal point of an angsty and inevitable love triangle, though most are rooted in tragedy, as her older sister, Bailey (Havana Rose Liu), recently died of the same heart problems that claimed their mother’s life when they were young.

Like Madeline’s Madeline, the material is a natural fit for Decker, who effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to Lennie’s complicated inner turmoil across a series of striking fantasy sequences. Early on, when Lennie steps out the door in the last sweater that her sister ever wore, she pictures the ground shaking and a storm brewing. The horizon shifts and trees float into the air, the clouds made of torn paper and the sky adopting an angry orange hue.

Lennie has been out of school for a few months, grieving in the California forest home where she and Bailey lived in the care of their kind grandmother (Cherry Jones) and quirky uncle (Jason Segel). Despite her rather morbid clothing choices, we sense that she’s earnestly trying to move forward on her own terms, as when she first catches sight of Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon). The notes that he plays on his trumpet are seen floating through the air and knocking down students in the hallway, who are all talking about him as Lennie walks down it.

But, then, Lennie finds herself unable to play her clarinet, and soon she’s challenged for and loses her position as the band’s first chair. She’s not sure about trying out for Julliard anymore, and she retreats back into grief, which is further complicated by her blossoming romance with Toby Shaw (Pico Alexander), who was dating Bailey at the time of her death. He wears his miserable heart on his sleeve, and is the only person who seems to understand the depth of Lennie’s pain. His attentions to her feel good, even though it also feels wrong and clashes with Lennie’s accumulated resentment for him as he monopolized her sister’s time.

Though The Sky Is Everywhere clearly aligns itself with one side of its central love triangle, it explores Lennie and Toby’s fraught relationship with sensitivity and a lack of judgment. We simply see that it lacks the intoxicating spark of Lennie and Joe’s relationship, which is more frequently tied to the film’s fantastical sequences. One moment in particular finds the pair lying in the grass and sharing a pair of earbuds while the flowers around them (portrayed by people in camouflaged, full-body suits) begin to move, as if to convey their greater awareness of the world around them and their fullness of feeling. In this moment, a familiar, even clichéd sight turns into something strange, as exciting as it is a little unsettling.

At times, Decker’s film does risk crowding out the genuine quality of these emotions with fanciful quirkiness, through goofy sound effects and cutaways and its aggressively hip backdrop of beanie’d artistes. Segel’s Uncle Big, for one, exists largely to do things like ask Lennie if she wants to go for a drive and talk by calling it a “session in the Truth Mobile,” while Lennie’s narration throughout the film is framed as an extension of her tendency to artfully scribble thoughts on any available surface, from sheet music to leaves to walls.

Mostly, though, Decker ably juggles her imagery alongside the film’s more traditional dramatic core. The fantasy sequences never come across as simplistic gimmicks because they’re always amplifying and expressing the things that Lennie feels and seeks to project outward. Love and grief are ways of disappearing into the clouds—of detaching from more earthly concerns.

In fact, The Sky Is Everywhere is so good at externalizing Lennie’s emotions that its final stretch comes across as completely obligatory. The vertices of the love triangle must eventually clash, and that rote convergence nearly derails the entire film, which has otherwise made considerable headway in its inventive expressions of common emotion.

There’s a spat with Joe, who does that thing that love interests do by standing in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. There’s a period of trying to make it right and, in the film’s bid to further the conflict, a period of Lennie abruptly lashing out at her loved ones. Perhaps overcoming these conflicts, as in so many other stories like this, is meant to assert the strength of Lennie’s feelings and “prove” how important these relationships are to her in the end. But The Sky Is Everywhere has already given us such a clear sense of her character that these scenes only feel redundant as they delay the expected conclusion. The genre gears clank most heavily in the film’s bland home stretch, sending it careening back to earth.