Lady Bird is one of the great coming-of-age movies you will ever get to see

LADY BIRD (M)

Rating: five stars (5 out of 5)
Director: Greta Gerwig (Nights and Weekends)
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts.

Before her life can start movie, she must stop and grow

Let the record show we are currently embedded in the richest vein of quality movies on offer for well over a decade.

Since Boxing Day, the overall calibre of titles gracing our cinemas has been resoundingly high. It is not going to last. So please, make the most of it while you can.

While you’re at it, make sure you get along to Lady Bird, one of the most graceful, funny, alert and alive coming-of-age pictures you will ever have the good fortune to see.

Goes without saying this is already a lock for one of the best movies of 2018.

“I wish I could live through something,” says 17-year-old Christine McPherson (played by the incomparable Saoirse Ronan) on the eve of commencing her final year of high school.

Make no mistake, her wish will be granted by film’s end. And you will be living through it right along with “Lady Bird”, the name by which Christine prefers to be called by everyone she meets.

(Those inverted commas are deliberate by the way. That’s exactly how Christine “Lady Bird” Johnson writes it down. You know, just like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.)

Yes, Lady Bird is a real character alright. However, being a distinct one-of-a-kind isn’t doing her any favours in her dreary, home town of Sacramento.

This bastion of Californian conformity feels like a conspiratorial practical joke against Lady Bird, and her ambition to be accepted into a fancy college on the other side of the country.

There is the ferociously fractious relationship Lady Bird shares with her perpetually exhausted and dissatisfied mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf).

One or the other may not last the year ahead. In their very first scene together, a blissful listening session to an audiobook suddenly escalates into a bitter argument, which ends with Lady Bird leaving via the nearest door.

At this point, I should mention Lady Bird and Marion have this disagreement while in a car travelling just beneath the speed limit.

Later in the movie, Lady Bird finds herself drifting further into that cavernous unmarked territory between the cool and the uncool at her rigorously Catholic high school.

There will be a so-right-it-just-has-to-go-wrong romance with one boy (Lucas Hedges), and a polar-opposite dalliance with another (Timothée Chalamet, star of the sublime Call Me By Your Name).

I could go on and on about the love of clever conversation this film sincerely promotes, its rare ability to pull a moment of palpable poignancy out of thin air, the magnificent performances of Ronan and Metcalf, and the miraculous writing and direction of Greta Gerwig.

But I won’t. For you’ll find yourself doing that anyway once Lady Bird has taken flight before you.