The Sky is Everywhere movie review: Apple’s Valentine’s Day offering is a visually ambitious charmer

Adapted by Jandy Nelson from her own novel, it tells the story of the 17-year-old clarinet prodigy Lennie Walker, who is reeling from the devastation of suddenly losing her sister Bailey to the same illness that took the life of their mother when they were children. Lennie (played by an excellent Grace Kaufman) lives with her grandmother in an almost fantastical house in the middle of the Californian woods, surrounded by majestic rose gardens, pretty creeks and winding forest pathways. Jason Segel plays her uncle Big, a pot-smoking dreamer whose apparent aimlessness is given a heartbreaking explanation deep in the film’s third act.

As she grapples with grief—Lennie refuses to allow her grandmother to clean her dead sister’s room and frequently slips into magic realist memories of their childhood—she finds herself drawn to two boys. Toby is her sister’s old boyfriend, who has taken to visiting them daily and just hanging around the house as he navigates his own sadness, and the magnificently named Joe Fontaine, a heartthrob musician who always seems to walk around with a spotlight shining on him. Quite literally.

It’s a classic YA set-up; one that we’ve seen in everything from the much-maligned Twilight films to Netflix’s excellent original series Never Have I Ever—the latter’s love triangle even has a grieving female protagonist, as do the To All the Boys movies, but they don’t really dwell on it. The Sky is Everywhere, however, belongs—at least thematically—to a rather neglected subgenre of American teen cinema.

Both The Spectacular Now, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl were phenomenal Sundance hits based on books. And both films, while aimed at an admittedly older audience, dealt with some rather intense issues, such as alcoholism and abandonment, identity and mortality. Can a movie like The Sky is Everywhere, which is so often so eloquent about matters of life and death, survive in an environment that has been tainted by three Kissing Booth films? It’s difficult to say. And I wonder if being on Apple TV+ gives it a fighting chance.

But a fighting chance is precisely what an oddity such as The Sky is Everywhere deserves. Messing up is okay, it says, heartbreakingly exuding exactly the sort of elder sibling energy that Lennie is missing in her life. She learns and grows through her mistakes, and as fanciful as some of the film’s visuals are, it is (almost) always rooted in a relatable emotional reality.

This is due, in large part, to Kaufman’s magnetic central performance, which often reels the film in when Decker’s visual language teeters on the edge of abstraction.

Its vibrant aesthetic doesn’t con you into thinking that the movie is a children’s fable, but it certainly softens the blow when the wallop of emotion strikes in the film’s final act. Think of it as a close cousin to JA Bayona’s A Monster Calls, a criminally overlooked movie that most people don’t even know exists.

Like that film, The Sky is Everywhere has genuine compassion for its characters, and not once does it use them for its own nefarious purposes. The commodification and aestheticisation of grief is a real thing, but The Sky is Everywhere wants no part of it. It’s another top-notch addition to Apple’s excellent roster of original programming, and an on-brand winner that the indie powerhouse A24 can add to its library of chic, auteur-driven hits.

The Sky is Everywhere
Director – Josephine Decker
Cast – Grace Kaufman, Jason Segel, Cherry Jones, Jacques Colimon, Pico Alexander
Rating – 3/5