You’ll have to forgive Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) for being anxious. For one thing, her name literally means “anxiety.” For another, she’s smart, sophisticated—and the only adult in her single-parent/only-child home. While her mother Grace (Eva Mendes) struggles to balance the responsibilities of motherhood (working two jobs to pay her daughter’s tuition) with her affair with a married man, it’s teenager Ansiedad who washes the dishes, scrubs the toilet and removes her sleeping mother’s pumps after a late night out. More often than not, Ansiedad eats dinner alone, dunking hot dog buns into a glass of bad coffee.
Adulthood can’t come soon enough, so when her English teacher Ms. Armstrong (Patricia Arquette) introduces the coming-of-age novel, Ansiedad decides to write her own story, metamorphosing from “plucky innocence” with a pink bike with streamers and a grandmother on her deathbed (both borrowed) to grownup. She charts her path on a colorful vision board with steps like “Slutwear,” “Dump Best Friend” and “Lose Virginity”—a plan she’s executing with the help of said BFF, Tavita (Raini Rodriguez).
Girl in Progress plays like an after-school special turned on its head, with the protagonist deliberately manufacturing the plot points of, well, an after-school special. This approach is at once edgier and safer than the genre it’s riffing on. Edgier because Ansiedad announces what she’s doing as she’s doing it, calling out not only the supporting characters (her mother, her teacher, the bad boy who will help her accomplish her final task) on their roles in her narrative but the formula itself. But safer because none of it—the drinking, the sex, the betrayal of her best friend—is really real, carried out sometimes literally with a wink.