A disastrous coming-of-age film completely devoid of authenticity, charm, or poignancy. It casts a pair of very gifted ladies, Dakota Fanning (dynamite in Night Moves earlier this year) and Elizabeth Olsen (slightly too old for the part), as recent high-school graduates desperate to lose their virginity during their final summer together on Long Island. Unfortunately, lest the film explore female friendship in an even relatively fresh or non-male-oriented way, this instantly leads to the introduction of a generic, brooding stud (Boyd Holbrook) over whom they can feud and scheme in a variety of ways, each more contrived than the next. He sells ice cream with glowering disdain by day and is a tortured photographer by night, living in a bohemian-wonderland studio apartment and reading poetry. A dreamboat with a perfectly curated catalog of chic tics, he is a total cipher and bore. Because writer and director Naomi Foner is firmly entrenched in the industry (she received an Oscar nomination for writing Running on Empty many moons ago and gave birth to the siblings Gyllenhaal), she has recruited a bevy of famous faces, including Ellen Barkin, Richard Dreyfuss, Demi Moore, and son-in-law Peter Sarsgaard, and put them to inert use in vapid, thinly drawn, and completely unrewarding roles. The film play as if Foner strung together two or three episodes of a pompous, tone-deaf CW series: the people are beautiful and entitled, the real estate expensive, the observations stale, the heart dead.

F