Com­ing of age with the cin­e­ma of Kirsten Dunst

Speak to any­one under the age of 30 and they will undoubt­ed­ly have had very dif­fer­ent first encoun­ters with Kirsten Dun­st. Maybe they attend­ed a Small Sol­diers-themed birth­day par­ty as a kid, or annoyed their par­ents by wear­ing out a VHS copy of Juman­ji. They may have stum­bled upon Bring It On at a sleep­over, or expe­ri­enced self-dis­cov­ery along­side the queer sen­si­bil­i­ties of Dick or Drop Dead Gor­geous. Per­haps they fell in love with her Mary-Jane Wat­son in Spi­der-Man, or they were the mis­fit who want­ed to skip school to recline wist­ful­ly in a mead­ow à la Lux in The Vir­gin Suicides.

What­ev­er the case, an entire gen­er­a­tion of movie­go­ers have grown up with Kirsten Dun­st. Very few film stars work­ing today can boast such a rich a var­ied career, but then Dun­st has always seemed like a one-off: a char­ac­ter actress in the guise of a movie star, with a CV lit­tered with both cult clas­sics and main­stream hits.

Dur­ing a recent AOL Build pan­el dis­cus­sion on The Beguiled, Dun­st was asked if she had con­scious­ly decid­ed to work on more mature projects of late, in ref­er­ence to 2016’s Mid­night Spe­cial and the third sea­son of the anthol­o­gy series Far­go. She was under­stand­ably tak­en aback by the insin­u­a­tion that it was some­thing new. ​“Per­son­al­ly I feel like I’ve always tried to do that,” she said. ​“It’s not like I’m sud­den­ly mak­ing indie films…”

It’s dis­ap­point­ing­ly com­mon for female actors to have to con­stant­ly fight to prove them­selves – just ask Dunst’s costar in The Beguiled, Nicole Kid­man, whose own strug­gle for recog­ni­tion was chron­i­cled ear­li­er this year in a fas­ci­nat­ing Buz­zfeed arti­cle. But Dunst’s own strug­gle seems to have large­ly flown under the radar, despite being a near-per­ma­nent fix­ture on our screens ever since she sat on Mia Farrow’s lap at aged sev­en in 1989’s New York Stories.

While she deserved­ly picked up the Best Actress award at the 2011 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val for Melan­cho­lia, it took jump­ing to tele­vi­sion for Dun­st to final­ly receive awards atten­tion at home, despite the fact that she has worked with numer­ous high-pro­file film­mak­ers, from Cop­po­la to Michel Gondry to Neil Jor­dan, and con­sis­tent­ly makes a strong impres­sion. Even the dump­ster fires on her resume have inter­est­ing lega­cies: it was Dunst’s ghast­ly love inter­est in Cameron Crowe’s Eliz­a­beth­town that inspired crit­ic Nathan Rabin to coin the term ​‘Man­ic Pix­ie Dream Girl’.

Per­haps the rea­son why she hasn’t received wider recog­ni­tion has some­thing to do with her youth appeal. Many of Dunst’s best-loved char­ac­ters have been caught in the emo­tion­al tail­spin of ado­les­cence, filled with the pain of puber­ty and eager to demon­strate their own worth, whether that’s through com­pet­i­tive cheer­lead­ing or by attempt­ing to make out with Brad Pitt as a six­tysome­thing vam­pire trapped in the body of a 12-year-old girl.

It’s also worth not­ing that these com­ing-of-age themes have con­sis­tent­ly been told through the lens of female writ­ers and direc­tors, par­tic­u­lar­ly her fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor, Sofia Cop­po­la. That Dunst’s on-screen sex­u­al awak­en­ing came with­out the usu­al las­civ­i­ous sur­vey­ing of her body seemed to con­fuse cer­tain observers, who did every­thing they could to infan­tilise her long into her twen­ties. ​“Dun­st is still in many ways a child-woman,” one British news­pa­per wrote in 2004, ​“with big gaps in her knowl­edge of life.”

In recent years, Dun­st has spo­ken of her grat­i­tude at hav­ing grown up around Cop­po­la. ​“I was 16 and work­ing with some­one who I thought was one of the coolest women alive,” she told The Gen­tle­woman in 2016. ​“I was start­ing to feel my sex­u­al­i­ty, but I wasn’t express­ing those feel­ings because I was a kid… Thank god it was with Sofia! I felt so safe, and I could laugh and be ner­vous about kiss­ing boys or what­ev­er. I had a real­ly good female role mod­el in this indus­try at a very impor­tant age.”

There’s a part of Dunst’s jour­ney which neat­ly mir­rors that of all those view­ers who came of age along­side her, end­less­ly search­ing for recog­ni­tion, strug­gling to write our own nar­ra­tives. With The Beguiled and an upcom­ing TV col­lab­o­ra­tion with Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos in the pipeline, plus her own direc­to­r­i­al debut – an adap­ta­tion of Sylvia Plath’s ​‘The Bell Jar’ – under­way, it feels like we’re final­ly enter­ing the age of Kirsten Dun­st. It’s an excit­ing time for fans of her work, caveat­ed by the nag­ging feel­ing that this real­ly ought to have hap­pened much sooner.