Review: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ Resists the Straight and Narrow

Navigating troubled culture-war waters with grace, humor and compassion, “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” is a movie that deserves a wide and diverse audience. Based on a young-adult novel by Emily Danforth, the film arrives in theaters without a rating, which is probably just as well. The Motion Picture Association of America has a habit of using the R rating to shoo teenagers away from realistic depictions of their own lives, a prohibition that is easy enough to get around in the age of digital streaming but that nonetheless serves as an official endorsement of evasion and repression.

The denial of the truth about adolescent sexuality — specifically what some of the characters delicately refer to as “SSA” (for “same-sex attraction”) — happens to be the film’s subject. Cameron, an 11th-grader played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is secretly involved with a girl named Coley (Quinn Shephard). When they get caught together, Cameron is sent away to God’s Promise, a boarding school that promises to “cure” her through therapy and prayer.

It is 1993, but the director, Desiree Akhavan (who wrote the script with Cecilia Frugiuele), does not make this feel like a period drama, notwithstanding the apt grunge-era clothes, hairstyles and musical cues. “Miseducation” is neither a glib sendup of a less enlightened era nor a pious reckoning with the bygone injustices of the past. It is more interested in how its characters feel than in what they might symbolize, and in how they grapple with the conflicting demands of faith and desire. It is also about the struggle between earnest young people and the equally earnest, painfully misguided adults who are trying to save their souls.

Of course, Danforth and Akhavan (whose previous feature was the post-collegiate coming-of-age comedy “Appropriate Behavior”) are hardly neutral observers. They are on the side of Cameron and her peers, standing with the children against their zealous oppressors. This is as much a matter of genre as of politics. Teenage movies and YA novels do not generally rally to the defense of adult authority. That would be monstrous.

But the people in charge of God’s Promise are not quite monsters, and the place is hardly a gothic nightmare. There are bed checks, group discussions and one-on-one sessions with Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), the headmistress, and Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), her sidekick (and brother), who claims to have overcome his own homosexuality. There are also singalongs, field trips and long discussions about sin and salvation. “Nobody is beating us,” Cameron says later. The cruelty of this brand of anti-gay “conversion therapy” is subtler than that, and the agents of that cruelty are less Lydia and Rick than the parents and guardians who have shunted Cameron and the others into their care.

Like any good combat movie, prison drama or high school comedy, “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” is about solidarity and treachery among the powerless. Cameron herself is a quiet, skeptical presence, determined to survive by keeping her head down and her feelings protected. Her roommate, Erin, seems to have bought into the God’s Promise program, so Cameron gravitates toward the obvious misfits, Jane (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck), who grow marijuana in the woods beyond campus.

Even as the plot takes some familiar turns — comical detours and a big tragic swerve — Akhavan steers away from cliché, and the cast avoids caricature. There is a delicate humanism at work here that feels especially refreshing, a commitment to respecting differences without sacrificing a clear ethical point of view.

It is possible to imagine, and for that matter to wish for, an angrier, more pointed critique of God’s Promise and the religious point of view it represents. But satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Akhavan deploys. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.

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'The Miseducation of Cameron Post'

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.