AllMovie

Liz Garbus, director of The Farm: Angola, USA and The Execution of Wanda Jean, returns with Girlhood, taking another compelling, insightful, and finally heartbreaking look at contemporary criminal justice. This time she focuses on two charismatic and articulate teenage girls, Shanae and Megan, as they journey through the Baltimore juvenile system. Garbus takes a clear-eyed view of these girls, the crimes they've committed, and their struggle to rise above their ugly childhoods and accept responsibility for their actions. The filmmaker doesn't sentimentalize or soft-pedal these girls' flaws, or the harshness of their circumstances, and this gives viewers a chance to get to know them and see their essential innocence. This is not to say that they are not both guilty of poor judgment and of criminal acts, but they are where they are because they couldn't cope with an extraordinarily difficult environment. There's something essentially ordinary about these girls, whatever their individual strengths and weaknesses. Garbus is obviously sympathetic to their plight, and recognizes the various factors that led them to their run-in with the law, but her film is fair about their share of responsibility for their situation. The juvenile system, meanwhile, works well for Shanae, whose calmness allows her to gain favor with her wardens and work the system. But the same system isn't equipped to deal with Megan's wildness, leaving her to fend for herself. Girlhood thoughtfully questions not just the system itself, but our unfair assumptions about the young people caught within it.