Janet Planet, the New A24 Film About an Enmeshed Mother and Daughter

When you inhabit Janet Planet, the gravitational pull belongs to two of the film’s glowing stars, one of whom is Julianne Nicholson. After all, Janet Planet, the directorial debut from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, is a mother-daughter drama that orbits around Nicholson’s extraordinary performance as Janet, a depressed woman stuck in a codependent relationship. The only thing is, Janet’s partner is, effectively, her 11-year-old daughter Lacy, a loner who sticks around when the various men in her mother’s life do not. Depicted by first-time actor Zoe Ziegler, Lacy has her own issues, too. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy tells her mother with a straight face. “Every moment of my life is hell.”

For decades, Nicholson has been an acclaimed performer on TV and in film. Recently, the 53-year-old American actor became A24’s go-to Janet by excelling as another character with the same name in Dream Scenario, while her stunning turn as Lori in Mare of Easttown earned her an Emmy Award for Supporting Actress in 2022. However, it was Monos, a Colombian thriller in which Nicholson embodies a prisoner of war, that truly won over Baker. Is there a connection, then, between the physical torture of Monos and the inner turmoil of Janet Planet? “Maybe,” says Nicholson, speaking from her home in early July. “Annie never shared why that film made her think of me as Janet. In Monos, I had a white stripe down the middle of my forehead because the character hadn’t dyed her hair in months, and I’m not afraid to grow the hair on my legs or under my armpits. I think it’s the lack of vanity.”

Set in the Massachusetts countryside during 1991, Janet Planet is a delicate character study divided into three chapters, each of them named after a person who inserts themselves into Lacy’s life, then abruptly leaves. First, there’s Janet’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a Vietnam veteran who competes with Lacy for Janet’s attention. Then there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend of Janet’s who laments to Lacy that her mother has “terrible taste” in men. That belief again proves true in a third chapter with the leader of a cult-ish hippie community, Avi (Elias Koteas). Notably, on a 2015 podcast with Marc Maron, Baker spoke about growing up in rural Massachusetts with her mother, feeling perturbed by the adults who entered and exited her childhood. However, Nicholson insists that Janet Planet isn’t autobiographical. “It’s a real thing, that particular relationship that can happen with single mothers and their children,” says Nicholson. “But it didn’t feel in any way connected to Annie’s own life, except for the world she created.”

While Janet Planet, a coproduction between A24, BBC Film, and Present Company, may sound similar to other coming-of-age films like Eighth Grade and Aftersun, it’s a distinct piece of work that proves that Baker is, already, a natural auteur. A celebrity in the world of theatre, Baker is responsible for plays such as The Aliens, Infinite Life, and, the Pulitzer-winner, The Flick, all of which possess long pauses. (Three hours long, The Flick is full of characters sweeping the floor in silence, often for a minute at a time.) Likewise, Janet Planet is a two-hour feature that shot only 50 of its screenplay’s 70 pages, defying Hollywood’s established page-per-minute ratio. While improvisation in cinema is usually associated with Judd Apatow and Christopher Guest-style adlibbing, Baker’s directing style requires her actors to naturally exist within their environment in a manner that can’t be scripted. For lengthy periods, Baker’s characters aren’t saying anything at all. Well, not literally, anyway.

“I wasn’t intimidated by the [short script] because I knew she wasn’t going to point the camera at me and Zoe, and ask us to come up with dialogue on our own,” says Nicholson. “It was more about going deeper into the world that we shared. I love finding those moments in between because that’s where the mystery lives.” In the introduction to Circle Mirror Transformation, Baker instructs actors to resist the tendency to rush lines amidst the silences, writing, “This is an inevitable feeling and you must fight against it.” Does Nicholson agree? “I do. When actors are nervous, the tendency is to just get the words out. You have to trust your director in those moments. You have to trust the outside eye, because it’s very hard to know, sometimes, what you’re doing. If it’s working, if it makes sense, if it’s interesting – you can’t know that.”

Even if Janet Planet is ostensibly an American production, it’s shot with a distinctly non-American sensibility. Along with the film’s meditative, unhurried pacing, the director of photography is Maria von Hausswolff, a Swedish cinematographer whose credits include the desolate, Icelandic landscapes of Godland and A White, White Day. When Janet and Lacy sleep, the night-time montages are redolent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, as are the soundscapes that encapsulate the noises of nature that keep Janet sane. “The place [of Janet Planet] feels very particular, but I think people can connect to it from all over the world,” says Nicholson. “Annie suggested I watch The Green Ray and Uncle Boonmee to immerse myself in different worlds and spaces.”

Like Baker, Nicholson grew up in Massachusetts; the pair even share the same birth year of 1971. After a brief stint modelling as a teen, Nicholson started a prolific acting career that includes supporting roles in starry dramas like August: Osage County, Blonde, and I, Tonya. Whenever she’s the lead, though, she excels, particularly in 2017’s Who We Are Now, in which her closing monologue could be an acting reel on its own. Thus Nicholson, at this point, rarely auditions – a rule she broke for the BBC show Dope Girls. “I wanted to work with [Babyteeth director] Shannon Murphy and I loved the script. But I passed because the higher-ups needed proof I’d be the right person. I said, ‘I’m not going to audition. If you don’t want me, that’s fine.’” She eventually relented. “I got off my high horse.” Depicting the rise of British drug culture in Soho at the end of World War I, Dope Girls launches later this year. “I’m excited for that to come out. I’ve just moved to England. It’s my first lead role here.”

In the meantime, Janet Planet will finally have its UK release, having strangely skipped awards season. While Baker’s drama is too raw and esoteric for multiplexes, the performances are undeniably powerful and, on another planet, Nicholson would have even more trophies to place next to her Emmy. In one heartbreaking scene, Janet reveals to Lacy, the two of them in bed, that she’s always believed she could make any man fall in love with her if she truly tried, and that gift has ruined her life. “We did that scene a number of times,” says Nicholson. “Annie would give me different notes, some of them as simple as ‘take your time’ or ‘speed it up’. But some notes were to find different beats.”

Nicholson continues, “I personally have a tendency with kids – 9, 10, 11 years old – to pay attention to them, to take care of them, to be extra kind to them. But some of the most interesting moments are when Janet isn’t paying attention to Lacy. It’s finding those places where she’s not holding her hand or making sure everything’s OK. Annie encouraged me to not always be extra attentive or overly friendly.” A film doesn’t have to be a parenting lesson? “Yeah. Parenting isn’t always being kind to your kid. When you live with someone 24/7, sometimes you have fights. Sometimes you don’t pay attention to each other. Sometimes it’s all love and joy. Being a parent or a child is complicated and layered. So often, we only see one version of that relationship.”

Janet Planet is out in UK cinemas on July 19.