Saoirse Ronan vs. California Catholic school life in Greta Gerwig's 'Lady Bird': First trailer

Actress Greta Gerwig moves behind the camera for Lady Bird, her semiautobiographical directorial debut starring Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn) as a teenage proxy for the filmmaker herself. Early festival reviews have been encouraging — for instance, Variety’s Peter Debruge wrote, “The real surprise is just how honest and personal this film proves to be — again, par for the course with Gerwig, and yet, fairly rare among first-time directors, who haven’t had nearly so much practice simply being real.” Now we have the film’s first trailer (watch it above).

The preview provides a decent overview of the up-and-down odyssey of Ronan’s “Lady Bird,” who’s assigned herself that in-quotation-marks name, and who struggles to cope with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), navigate love interests (including Manchester by the Sea’s Lucas Hedges), and find a way to escape California (and her Catholic school confines) in favor of the East Coast, where she imagines a culturally rich new life. Given that she’s an iconoclast whose rebellious attitude and impulses regularly lead her into trouble, Lady Bird’s saga appears to be an alternately amusing and poignant one, with Ronan delivering a charismatic lead performance.

Co-starring Tracy Letts, Timothée Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Lois Smith, Lady Bird will be a coming-of-age story to keep an eye on when — after it screens at this year’s New York Film Festival — it arrives in theaters on Nov. 10.

Saoirse Ronan in ‘Brooklyn’ — watch a deleted scene:

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