While this year’s Sundance Film Festival recently concluded, one of the most acclaimed films out of last year’s edition will now be arriving in just under a month. Jamie Dack’s feature debut Palm Trees and Power Lines, which picked up four Independent Spirit Award nominations, follows a teenager’s experience beginning a relationship with a man twice her age. Starring Lily McInerny, Jonathan Tucker and Gretchen Mol, the first trailer has now arrived ahead of a March 3 release from Momentum Pictures.
Here’s the full synopsis “Seventeen-year-old Lea (Lily McInerny) spends her summer break aimlessly tanning in her backyard with her best friend, tiptoeing around her needy mother, and getting stoned with a group of boys from school. This monotony is interrupted by a chance encounter with Tom (Jonathan Tucker), an older man who promises an alternative to Lea’s unsatisfying adolescent life. But as things progress between them, red flags about Tom’s life begin to surface, and Lea chooses to ignore them. Under Tom’s influence, Lea begins to see her mom as unfit and her friends as a waste of her time. Isolated from those around her, Lea discovers Tom’s true intentions and finds herself in a situation that she never could have imagined.”
Caleb Hammond said in our 2023 preview, “In Palm Trees and Power Lines, teenagers drink alcohol and virginities are lost in backseats, but a languidness hangs over the proceedings. Boredom is the driving force and equal time is spent tanning in backyards or practicing makeup with YouTube’s aid. This stagnant summer air—where everything doesn’t seem possible—sets the table for an encounter at a diner between Lea (newcomer Lily McInerny) and the much older Tom (Jonathan Tucker). Red flags pile up immediately, but you never judge Lea for either missing or willfully ignoring them. With a sobering climax followed by a harder-to-swallow coda, Dack proves completely in-sync with Lea’s headspace. It takes real guts for a first-time filmmaker to eschew empty empowerment in favor of less satisfying, more morally complicated territory.”
See the trailer below.
Palm Trees and Power Lines opens in theaters and on VOD on March 3.