Mommie dearest

Leading Ladies

SVA Theatre

If someone you love has ever done something creative--and if you're an uncompromisingly critical faultfinder (sometimes known as "a dick") like me--you know how scary it is to contemplate the possibility that the gods don't parcel out talent according to how much you might love someone, and that the person you love might create something that doesn't meet your critical standards.

So let me just tell you how first relieved, and then exhilarated, I was to discover this film, cowritten by my very own daughter, to be smart, funny, and warm, kinda like her. It is, clinically analyzed, the story of a young woman facing her own desires, and more fundamentally facing herself and her dictatorial mother and her narcissistic twin sister. But as Jen's cowriter, Erika Randall Beahm (who directed the film with her husband), said in the postscreening Q&A, it's not about gay/straight, it's about love. As she didn't say, it's also a ton of fun.

It's playing (with an added screening 6 p.m. Sunday the 13th, SVA Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St. in Manhatten) at Newfest, the NY LGBT film festival, and it's showing next month at QFest in Philadelphia. Like all indie filmmakers making the festival circuit, the Beahms are looking for distribution, and all I can say about that is, I see a bunch of movies that aren't nearly this good. So if there's any justice in the universe . . .

Anyway, look for it--look hard--and see it if you get a chance.