Rachel is a rambunctious girl from a polygamist colony in southern Utah. On Rachel’s 15th birthday, she finds a forbidden cassette tape. Having never seen anything like it before, Rachel plays the cassette tape, and finds glorious rock & roll thereupon. Weeks later, Rachel realizes a miracle has occurred - and the cassette tape must have something to do with it. She leaves her family and runs away to the closest city: Las Vegas. There she searches for the singer of the band on the cassette tape.
Acting
Julia Garner's feral, luminous breakout performance
Direction
Rebecca Thomas treats magical realism with deadpan seriousness
Score
The cassette's actual song becomes genuinely mystical
Director
Rebecca Thomas
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The song on the tape is 'Hanging On' by Active Child, and director Rebecca Thomas specifically wrote the script around it. The track was so central that the film almost couldn't get made when licensing looked impossible.
Thomas grew up Mormon and based the fictional cult on real FLDS communities in southern Utah, though she deliberately avoided making it a 'message movie' about polygamy. The film instead uses that isolation to explore how teenagers everywhere mythologize music.
US
