Altered states: "My Old Ass"

When men talk, think and write about time and time travel, their thoughts tend to stray in the direction of assassinating the baby Hitler: a quest for heroism, or maybe just vengeance and carnage. When women do likewise, we end up with Freaky Friday and 13 Going on 30: searches for greater wisdom and understanding. (In very rare cases, such as Alice Lowe's current release Timestalker, the movies occasion a quest for wisdom and carnage, suggesting the two need not be mutually exclusive.) In the readymade comfort movie My Old Ass, cranberry farmer's daughter Elliott (Maisy Stella) celebrates her 18th birthday by sneaking off from her family to trip balls on an island with friends, only for this particular trip to wind up with Elliott's 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her on a log, telling her - in no uncertain terms - to do everything within her powers to avoid a boy called Chad. It's pure fantasy (if you could go back in time to tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?) and pure movie set-up, but in this initial encounter, writer-director Megan Park establishes the mode of address of the film entire: not the cranked-up, farce-adjacent jabber of the slicker studio movies in this vein, but that of a casual fireside or dormroom chat. The title, characteristically, is the name under which Elliott saves her older self's phone number, arming herself with an advice line that becomes doubly handy when Percy Hynes White's Chad - long hair, sandals, surprising depths - shows up at the lake.

My Old Ass is mostly repeating old wisdoms: value your leisure time and loved ones, be careful around Chads, gather ye rosebuds (or cranberries) while ye may. (One novelty: an acknowledgement we might only be able to steer our younger selves so far, or that there might only be so long our younger selves could bear to listen to our old asses. There's life to be lived, and there are mistakes to be made that are part of the process.) What's cheering is that Park is saying all this the way a friend might: unforced, relaxed, with obvious and abundant affection. She's recruited a major ally and selling point in Stella, hitherto unknown but here revealed as a star by name and nature, possessed of that same X factor that dazzled when we first fell head over heels for Julia Stiles or Emma Stone. She makes a convincing teenager: witness how she expands an exclamatory "Jesus!" from two syllables into three, and the previously gay Elliott's cringing upon realising she might also like boys like Chad now. Yet this is also demonstrably an actress who knows what she's doing, the genre she's working in, and what elevates the best teen movie heroines over and above the rest. (Judging on Park's aerial shots, Stella also knows how to handle a motorboat, one deftness of touch among many here.) The production around her is a small one, content to gather a cast of funny faces who visibly vibed with one another on the shores of the one, sunny location. Park permits herself one flourish: a Justin Bieber homage that really will make anybody over the age of 21 feel antiquated. (Never heard the song before, no idea of its cultural significance. Sorry.) And she's pushing for feels over funnies, sobs rather than setpieces: despite prominent billing, Plaza is only present in person for a couple of scenes, leaving us downstream from The Notebook, The Lake House and Nicholas Sparks-land. (Perhaps you can only get out this way by boat: all the tears shed have left the terrain waterlogged.) Yet the sobs are well-earned, and you come away from My Old Ass feeling more movies should be assembled like a summer camp rather than a mid-range family car or military campaign. If the Elliott-Chad story gets you - as, I must confess, it got me - it's for one reason: it's been told with a sweetness you may have thought had been all but purged from American movies in the era of Deadpool & Wolverine. (Again: when men talk, think and write about time and time travel...)

My Old Ass is now showing in selected cinemas.