The Kids Are All Right

LOS ANGELES -- It makes perfect sense that "The Kids Are All Right" is opening the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Director Lisa Cholodenko's movie, premiering at LAFF on Thursday night, unfolds around the L.A. neighborhoods of Venice and Echo Park. Its characters include a community gardener who runs a restaurant focused on locally grown organic ingredients, and Joni Mitchell's music figures prominently in the narrative. The film's central plot - a lesbian couple's interloping sperm donor upends their yuppie family life - could hardly be more Left Coast.

Yet the movie from the "Laurel Canyon" filmmaker was once set in New York, and some of the story's central creative decisions were shaped not only from its earlier placement thousands of miles away but also by what Cholodenko experienced while living in Manhattan.

The most talked-about title (and the biggest sale at $5 million) in January's Sundance Film Festival, "The Kids Are All Right" follows many of the conventions of the domestic suburban dramedy: take a seemingly ordinary, interesting couple with some smart, distinct teenagers and see how many deep and potentially dangerous fissures are revealed when the family is twisted in uncomfortable directions.

Although Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg's script may start with that familiar form, "The Kids Are All Right" veers into fresh directions from the start. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) boot up gay male porn to spark a frisky bedroom mood. They try so hard to parent their daughter Joni ("Alice in Wonderland's" Mia Wasikowska) and son Laser ("Bridge to Terabithia's" Josh Hutcherson) that they risk parodying emotionally honest child-rearing. And when the film's couples go at it (either in fighting or in lovemaking), they do so with a frankness that you rarely witness - so much so that the Motion Picture Association of America initially said the film was too sexually explicit for even an R rating.

"Yes," Cholodenko says, "I had to cut some thrusting." It wound up with an R, but what she didn't trim was the venom in Nic and Jules' clashes. "If it were up to you, our kids wouldn't even write thank-you cards. They'd just send out good vibes," Nic says to Jules derisively at one point. Says Cholodenko, "In long-term relationships, sometimes your resentments can turn on a dime."