Interplanet Janet Is Over, Janet Planet Is My New Best Friend

There was always something too smug about Interplanet Janet. She’s a galaxy girl? And she’s a solar-system miss from a future world? There’s never been a planet she hasn’t seen? Sounds like a know-it-all. Meanwhile, Annie Baker is offering a delightfully unknowing alternative: a mom named Janet who has to ask her kid what to do. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright’s debut film, Janet Planet, just dropped its first trailer, and even the two-minute edit operates as a kind of heartbreaking tone-poem about a mom who floats on air and her precocious child. Starring Julianne Nicholson as the mother, and Zoe Ziegler as her daughter, Lacy, the film has monstrous buzz following its time on the festival circuit. “Every moment in my life is hell,” says the 11-year-old lead in the trailer — which is the kind of memorable line that proves the buzz right. Janet Planet comes out on June 21, so mark at least one day off on your calendar this summer when you can plan to smile wistfully and shed a single tear.