Name: Girls Like Girls
Director: Hayley Kiyoko
Genre: Romance, Drama
Released: 2026-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 95 min
Cast: Maya da Costa, Myra Molloy, Levon Hawke, Zach Braff, Remy Marthaller

A three-minute pop video does not usually leave behind a young-adult novel and a feature film, but Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls Like Girls” has quietly become all three. Her debut as a feature director takes the smallest unit of that story, a single summer crush between two teenage girls, and stretches it to the length of a movie.

The film belongs to Coley, a seventeen-year-old who lands in a small Oregon town carrying the recent death of her mother, and to Sonya, the neighbor she falls for and who is not yet sure what she wants. Kiyoko keeps the conflict almost entirely interior. There is no villain here, no town mob, no punishing reveal, only self-doubt, inherited unease, and the ordinary vertigo of a first attachment. That choice is the whole proposition: a queer coming-of-age story that refuses to organize itself around threat, and asks instead what tenderness looks like when nobody is being chased.

Casting two relative newcomers, Maya da Costa as Coley and Myra Molloy as Sonya, is itself an argument. The film wants faces a viewer cannot pre-read, performers who arrive without a public romance or a franchise to color the work. Around them sit more familiar names in smaller registers, Zach Braff as Curtis and Levon Hawke as Trenton, but the weight rests on the two leads and the close, unhurried attention the camera pays them. It is a casting strategy that trusts the audience to fall for strangers, the same way the characters do.

Kiyoko comes to the director’s chair from the stage, not from film school or a run of shorts. She wrote the song, directed its video, then wrote the novel the film adapts, and co-wrote the screenplay with Stefanie Scott, a friend who appeared in the original clip. That is an unusually closed loop, with author, composer, director and adapter all one person revisiting her own material across forms. Few first features arrive with that much pre-history attached, and fewer still are built by someone who has already watched an audience claim the source as its own.

The source is worth understanding as a text in its own right. The video, two girls in a backyard and a bruised confrontation with a boyfriend, circulated less as a music promo than as a piece of shorthand, passed between viewers who recognized their own first crush in it. The novel that followed expanded the same characters into prose and gave them a longer runway. By the time the feature arrives, much of its audience already knows the beats, so Kiyoko’s task is not to introduce Coley and Sonya but to deepen two people the fans feel they have known for a long while. Few pop songs make the crossing into cinema at all, and fewer still carry their author the whole way across.

Set beside its forebears, the film lands inside a small but durable tradition. The rural-summer first-love film has a canon, running from Lukas Moodysson’s “Show Me Love” to Maria Maggenti’s “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love” and Dee Rees’s “Pariah,” and “Girls Like Girls” inherits its preference for tenderness over tragedy. What it updates is the surrounding weather. This is a story made by and for viewers who grew up streaming the video on a phone, for whom coming out reads less as a single cliff-edge than as a slow acclimatization. Where the older films treated queerness as the dramatic engine, Kiyoko treats it as the setting and lets grief and self-trust carry the load. The risk in that softness is real, but so is its honesty about how most first loves actually feel.

Whether a song-sized idea can fill a feature is the open question the film has to answer in the room, not on paper. A three-minute video runs on suggestion, while ninety-odd minutes demand structure, and the emotional shorthand that made the original travel so far is exactly what a feature cannot lean on for long. The closed loop of authorship cuts both ways. A creator adapting her own myth gains intimacy but loses the outside eye that might have pushed the material somewhere less comfortable. The film has not yet faced critics or an audience beyond its first festival room, and its premise, that a beloved fragment deserves a full canvas, is the thing under test rather than a settled fact.

The credited principals are Maya da Costa, Myra Molloy, Levon Hawke and Zach Braff, working from a screenplay by Kiyoko and Stefanie Scott. The production rolls up Marc Platt Productions, BuzzFeed Studios, CR8IV DNA and GLG Films, with Focus Features handling distribution, a studio-specialty berth that signals theatrical ambition rather than a quiet platform drop.

“Girls Like Girls” premieres at Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, on June 18, and opens in U.S. theaters the following day, June 19. It runs 95 minutes.