Gia Coppola's Mainstream is an Enchanting, Unsurprising Cautionary Tale
Mainstream opens on Frankie ( Maya Hawke) — an aimless twenty-something living in L.A. who bartends to get by but dreams of making it big on YouTube. The film introduces her using text-on-screen in a series of dialogue cards straight out of a movie from the Silent Era, harkening back to a time before everything was so loud. In her sophomore feature succeeding 2013’s Palo Alto, Coppola returns to the familiar creative breeding ground of disillusioned, self-destructive young people caught in the current of the cultural zeitgeist. This time, the environment is far more ravenous, more cutth...