The first thing to be said about Good One, a sensation out of Sundance and Cannes opening this week in limited theaters, is how quiet it is—an indie movie about a father-daughter camping trip in the Catskills that you inhale like a lungful of forest air. The second is how loudly its central performance speaks. With astonishing assuredness, newcomer Lily Collias plays Sam, a 17-year-old who mostly endures the company of her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy, also along for the camping trip)—two men in middle age who josh and joke as they hike, stressing about their careers and the disastrous state of their marriages. Sam is the good one in this triangle, a low-key teenager who withstands their teasing, cooks their dinner on a camp stove, exudes all the ambivalence of an almost-adult who still loves her father but is poised to leave him behind. Good One, a debut feature written and directed by India Donaldson, recalls the filmmaking of Kelly Reichardt in its near-plotless naturalism—until the whole thing turns on an act of bad judgment by one of the men that has heartbreaking power.
Good One is in limited theaters on August 9.
“It’s very honest about how people are flawed,” Collias says when I meet up with her in lower Manhattan. She’s dressed down in a T-shirt and pants, modest in her bearing but equipped with luminous gray-green eyes that fix on you with disarming attention. Collias is only 19 but has a watchful precocity, an easy air of someone much older. (She got the part in Good One when she was in high school in Los Angeles; production started in Brooklyn and upstate New York weeks after she graduated.) “Our objective was to make the movie as unbiased as possible,” she continues. “Because everyone in it is so broken in their own way and just trying to find themselves through it. So we didn’t want it to feel like a statement.”
It’s hardly that. Good One is a conversation piece, but one suffused with compassion—for Sam, who is lovestruck for a girlfriend back in the city, and for the two men who hardly know what to make of her—and it has a lot of silence. One of the remarkable aspects of Collias’s performance, her first role of any size (she also had a small supporting part in Palm Trees and Power Lines, another buzzy Sundance film from 2022), is how little she says in the film.
When I bring this up as potentially daunting for a first starring role, Collias says that it excited her. She loves the plays of Annie Baker, she says. “And Sam is always so deep in her head. Always somewhere else.” It’s not the way she is herself: Collias likes to talk everything out, “sprawl it all on the table so I can see how it lays in my mind.” So Sam’s reticence held her in awe.
The movie was shot over 12 days in Bedford Stuyvesant and then in the Catskills, where the tiny cast stayed in a rented house. “If you walked two minutes you were in the middle of nowhere,” Collias says. Having been a high school student in Los Angeles not long before stepping in front of Donaldson’s camera, this was a crash course in indie filmmaking. She met her costars, McCarthy and Le Gros, the day they began shooting: “I was kind of like, how is this going to happen in such a short period of time?” But she drew confidence from the older, experienced actors, whose enthusiasm convinced her they were doing something special. “James in particular,” she says. “He’s been doing indie films longer than I’ve been alive, so to feel that from him was important.”
Collias can’t tell me about the projects she has lined up—though one of them, she hints, is a film of much grander scale than Good One. I’ve caught her in a time of settling into her new life in New York—she has an apartment downtown, a coterie of art school friends—and she’s been reading books and going to exhibitions and plays and repertory cinemas, feeding her interests one by one. (She just saw the play Pre-Existing Condition, is determined to get to Oh, Mary! on Broadway, and is reading the grief-struck memoir Molly by Blake Butler.) “I feel very grounded,” she says, even though you can tell it’s a heady time. She was in Paris last spring for the Louis Vuitton anniversary show, an invitation from the fashion house that came a little out of the blue, and initially felt to her like a scam. But her mother is French and she spoke the language with her at home in LA and on summer trips to her grandmother’s house in France. She brought her brother to Paris and marveled at Nicolas Ghesquière’s creations up close. Another art form to experience; even more to take in. “The movement, the weight of the pieces, how they look when they’re actually being worn and walked in. I could go on a whole spiel about how exciting it was to see fashion like that.”
