So this is a Sofia Coppola movie about five sisters growing up in a religious household, and you’d think “oh, a movie by a woman about girls, obviously a very female voice thing,” but in fact: kinda no?

Because the way the film is structured is in retrospective narration from some boys who wanted to date the girls, including one bit that’s actually like an interview with the adult version of one of the boys. (This is a weird choice in general, made weirder by the fact that the boy is Josh Hartnett, and the adult version of him looks absolutely nothing like adult Josh Hartnett. Like, it legit took me a minute to realize what was even happening.)

And in the present, the girls… mostly don’t say much. One of them is Kirsten Dunst, and I don’t know if she just happened to be the breakout star, or if her character was meant to be the main character all along — she’s definitely more developed than the other girls, character-wise, but… not by much. Even she mostly just smiles enigmatically, makes out enigmatically, and essentially goes through the entire movie as an enigma.

And ultimately, that’s what the movie is: A story about these girls, and their life, and how nobody really ever understood them at all, which it dramatizes by keeping the viewer from understanding them. It’s a fine enough film, and the adult-narrated portrait of Detroit circa 1975 evokes a kind of Wonder Yearsy nostalgia for one’s childhood; but I can’t help but feel like it would have been better if it had actually let its main characters be visible onscreen.