Josephine Deck­er piv­ots to YA lite in the trail­er for The Sky Is Everywhere

Though she’s pri­mar­i­ly known for her bor­der­line-exper­i­men­tal por­traits of women with unruly psy­cholo­gies, Josephine Deck­er is tak­ing a hard left turn with her next fea­ture. The direc­tor-writer behind such recent tri­umphs as Madeline’s Made­line and one-time LWLies cov­er film Shirley will switch things up by mak­ing a for­ay into the boom­ing world of YA lit­er­a­ture adap­ta­tions, bring­ing the teen-beloved nov­el The Sky Is Every­where to the screen.

The first trail­er pri­or to the film’s fast approach­ing world pre­mière at Sun­dance arrived online this morn­ing, teas­ing Decker’s take on the two pro­fun­di­ties most com­pre­hen­si­ble to ado­les­cents: love and loss. In the mossy idyll of the Pacif­ic North­west, the young Lennie (Grace Kauf­man) faces both in a com­ing-of-age nar­ra­tive all too famil­iar to those up on the lat­est trends in paper­back sales.

She’s in for the most emo­tion­al­ly tax­ing school year of her life after her big sis­ter and oth­er half Bai­ley dies unex­pect­ed­ly, leav­ing Lennie as well as Bailey’s ex Toby (Pico Alexan­der) choked with grief. It seems like they might be start­ing to find solace in one anoth­er, until new kid in class Joe Fontaine (Jacques Col­imon) catch­es Lennie’s eye and sends her fur­ther into her thick­et of guilty self-questioning.

All the while, her jour­ney takes metaphor­i­cal form in music, as the clar­inetist tries to regain the joy required to make her art. That inner trans­for­ma­tion seems to take fan­tas­ti­cal terms onscreen, the seg­ments of grav­i­ty defi­ance and door­jamb por­tals in the mid­dle of red­wood forests both a lit­tle clos­er to the cre­ative breaks from real­i­ty in Decker’s more grown-up-geared work.

While it’s easy to see this teamup with A24 and Apple TV as the lat­ter half of the ​“one for me, one for them” par­a­digm for Deck­er, there’s no rea­son to assume she won’t bring the sum total of her tal­ents to bear on this job, kid stuff as it might appear. With an accom­plished direc­tor behind the cam­era, this less-reput­ed genre could set a new stan­dard for how high it can soar.