Aubrey Plaza plays a teen’s middle-aged self : NPR

Eighteen-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) might be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever been a teenager from a small town. She’s just weeks away from leaving behind her quiet and all-too-familiar childhood surroundings for the excitement and promise of college in “the city” – Toronto, in this case – and already has one foot out the door. Spending time with her parents and little brothers takes a back seat, of course, to hanging out with her best friends around the Muskoka Lakes in her dingy old motorboat and finally hooking up with her longtime crush.

What differentiates Megan Park’s sneakily affecting and quirkily-titled My Old Ass from other last-summer-before-adulthood movies is its high-concept premise of a hallucinogenic trip which proves literally existential. For her birthday, Elliott and friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) camp out in the woods and take mushrooms. Elliott’s experience conjures up her 39-year-old self, played by the always fascinating Aubrey Plaza.

Younger Elliott has a lot of questions – plus a couple of harsh critiques – for Older Elliott. Older Elliott is happy to impart some sage wisdom and advice, to a point. Don’t take time spent with your family for granted. Wear your retainer. Oh, and also: Avoid anyone named Chad.

Almost immediately Elliott meets a gangly guy around her age named – what else? – Chad (Percy Hynes White); he’s taken a summer job on her parents’ cranberry farm. Up to this point, she’s only ever been romantically interested in women. But she’s drawn to him anyway, partially because any headstrong teenager would be compelled to rebel against Older Elliott’s frustratingly vague warning, and also because Chad is effortlessly charming and almost-too-perfect in every way. She tries pushing him away, but the two collide, the experience throwing everything Elliott thought she knew about herself and her sexuality into whack.

Kerrice Brooks as Ro, Maisy Stella as Elliott, and Maddie Ziegler as Ruthie in My Old Ass.

Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

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Courtesy of Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

There’s an array of directions a filmmaker could go in with such a prompt, and Park and her well-assembled cast ultimately craft a coming-of-age story that’s uniquely satisfying and resonant, not unlike Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, with a dash of The Twilight Zone thrown in. It’s not a psychedelic, woo-woo kind of film, nor does it dabble in CGI-produced special effects conveying magical or otherworldly happenings.

The closest it gets to fantasy is a brief, playful musical number harkening back to Elliott’s childhood obsession with a certain Canadian pop star. Otherwise, My Old Ass is grounded firmly in a kind of ordinary alternative reality where, for reasons mercifully never explained, a young adult might have a chance to speak directly to their “middle-aged” self. (Note: Calling a 39-year-old “middle-aged,” as younger Elliott does, may seem like a dig – and it is – but technically, she’s not wrong.) Hollywood’s bludgeoned the multiverse theme to a pulp, yet here’s proof a clever and refreshing spin can still be had.

The absence of mystical lore leaves ample space for rich character- and world-building in a tidy 90-minute package. Elliott as portrayed by Stella moves, thinks, and expresses herself like a real Gen-Z teenager might: horny, kind of bratty (prescient, given the present era), and a little self-absorbed, while also being confident, outspoken, and curious about a wider world she has yet to experience. Older Elliott gets less screen time and has the arguably trickier task of emanating wisdom hard-earned from actually experiencing that wider world, while still seeming deeply connected to the optimistic 18-year-old she once was. Plaza pulls it off by tapping into her natural talent for conveying malaise without being boring, and approaching her side of the character with wit and compassion.

Ultimately, the two parts add up to a whole that wonderfully captures dual essences: youth and inexperience, and age and wariness. Park engages with perennial questions of identity and, most profoundly, ponders whether hindsight is truly 20/20, or something less clearly defined. There are facets to be appreciated in each stage of life; the challenge is in recognizing them in real time.