GRASS STAINS sounds more like the title of a Tide commercial than a movie. When I saw it in the Santa Barbara Film Festival guide, I almost passed it by because of that. But the film stars Tye Sheridan, who has been cast as Wade Watts in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernie Cline’s READY PLAYER ONE. I’d seen him in the TREE OF LIFE and X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, but I wanted to see if he could carry a movie. The answer, I’m happy to report, is a resounding yes. In fact, GRASS STAINS is full of talent and surprises.
Tye plays Conrad, a teenage kid who’s having trouble with his overbearing mother, but is starting to fall in love for the first time with a neighborhood girl who has a crush on him, Grace (Kaitlyn Dever). One day, while Conrad is screwing around with his buddies, they decide to play a prank on the girlfriend’s family. Her older brother gives chase, but ends up getting gravely injured in the process. The kids have to make a fateful decision, one that runs the risk of driving the two teenage lovers apart. Conrad has to struggle with taking responsibility for his actions, and how to react to hurting those he loves.
That all sounds like heady stuff for a coming of age film, and it is. In lesser hands, this could easily have been a bad film doomed never to be seen outside of festivals. But everyone is bringing their A game here, especially writer / director Kyle Wilamowski. He pulls deep emotion out of his characters, while keeping you engaged throughout with a hefty dose of dramatic tension. Characters make bad decisions, ones you want (but also don’t want) them to fix. When they try to, all hell breaks loose.
A film like this either succeeds or fails based on its leads, and in this respect GRASS STAINS is a roaring success. Tye Sheridan is a superstar in the making. Here he’s got to deliver immaturity, earnestness, guilt, fear, rebellion, euphoria, and love. He pulls it all off with absolute conviction, while remaining captivating throughout. That’s a remarkable depth and range. And Kaitlyn Dever is equally outstanding as Grace. I can’t say enough about her. Her performance is extraordinary. Kyle Wilamowski made the bold decision to cast age-appropriate teens, rather than older ones. It absolutely the right idea.
GRASS STAINS isn’t a conventional Hollywood story. The material is nontraditional enough that I assumed it was based on a true story. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it instead came mostly from the head of writer / director Kyle Wilamowski. While there was a quite loose basis in an event from his past, he took this raw material and turned it into something much more bold and challenging. I wouldn’t have thought this would have worked on the page, but kudos to him for having the ability, confidence, and skill to pull it off. I’ll certainly be watching for his future projects.
There’s one other parallel I’d like to highlight, though it isn’t an overt one. If you’re a fan of STRANGER THINGS, you should see GRASS STAINS. There’s nothing supernatural here — GRASS STAINS is far more grounded. It is set a couple of decades ago, though the time period is a bit vague. The main similarity is that there are compellingly drawn teenage characters struggling with life or death decisions, and the beginnings of adulthood, behind the backs of their parents.
Teenage angst is something we can all relate to, but heightened teenage angst is a remarkably tricky subject to tackle in a convincing enough way to get adults to watch it. One needs only look at all the awful teen dramas on TV to get a sense of how badly this can go wrong. Against all odds, GRASS STAINS, despite being an independent film, avoids all the pitfalls. The talent on display here is as good as it gets.
