Dir. Dee Rees
Score: 7.3

After a night at a sweaty club, a young Brooklyn woman changes her clothes on the bus before having to face her mother at home. But rather than changing out of something skimpy and too-revealing, she instead changes from city-tough lesbian to high school casual. This isn't the only common trope Dee Rees plays off of in her fearless feature debut, in fact, the film itself is a slight inversion of the coming-of-age story in which the child distances themselves from their parents. In Rees' world of young lesbians, the common theme is the manner in which their parents turn them out.

Alike (Adepero Oduye) is a shy woman, going to dyke clubs with her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) at night, and trying her best to avoid her mother's over-protective wrath in the morning. Close with her father, Arthur (Charles Parnell), a detective, Alike clashes with her mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), over the usual sorts of teen-parent disputes, but the underlying thread of their angst is her mother's suspicion of her sexual identity, which she identifies as being compromised by her relationship with Laura. In an attempt to get her daughter back in the fold, Audrey introduces Alike to the daughter of a friend at church, Bina (Aasha Davis), but unbeknownst to her, Bina has designs on Alike herself. To make matters worse, Arthur may or may not be having an affair during his late-night work sessions, a fact that strains the family meridian even further.

With this kind of a set-up, the film has no choice but to build to a shattering climax, but to Rees' considerable credit, it never settles for brassy melodrama. Instead it rises and falls on small, understated moments ("I know God doesn't make mistakes," Audrey hisses to her daughter midway through the film, a sentence Alike returns in kind towards the end), and contents itself with staying true to its well-realized characters: It doesn't stack the deck to achieve its ends. Alike might be a sweetly sympathetic character most of the time, but that doesn't absolve her of her bouts of petulance and selfishness; as neurotic and overbearing as Audrey may seem, many of her fears are entirely justified by her oldest daughter and husband, whom, she points out correctly, are remarkably similar in nature; Arthur, for his part, might be cheating on his wife and seem a stern taskmaster with his family, but he's the one who remains devoted to his daughter no matter what.

It's a very assured and ambitious debut, a small but potent story that examines the well-honed powder keg relations of mothers and teen daughters with a fresh eye, undaunted by the many such stories that have come before. The question implicit in the film's title is never cleanly explained: as a testament to how even-handed and carefully put together the final piece is, by the end it's impossible to know exactly to whom its referring.