Mike Mills' Probes the 'Beginning of Now' With New Film
Mike Mills’s new film, 20th Century Women, is about many things—skateboarding, Talking Heads, the confusion and loneliness of being a teenager, Susan Sontag, feminism, Jimmy Carter’s crisis of confidence speech. “My films can start out as little weird constellations, and then you kind of add another piece,” Mills says, perched on an egg-shaped red chair at the New York City offices of the indie film company A24. The closest the film comes to a hook is this: What is it like to be a young teenage boy raised in a household of women? Or, as someone in the movie asks, “Do you need a man to raise a man?”
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Annette Bening plays and is soon alerting him to the existence and higher purposes of menstruation, Lou Reed and the clitoris.
