My Old Ass

It looks like a teen sex comedy, but it's actually a poignant look at one journey from girl to woman, with Aubrey Plaza providing advice as her older self.

Sometimes you go looking for one thing, and then you find something else. At first you’re a little bit disappointed because you were chasing the anticipation, but eventually you come to appreciate what you found for just being what it is.

That was my experience with “My Old Ass,” which I went in fully expecting to be a bawdy sex comedy. It’s about an 18-year-old girl who, one night after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, is visited by her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza, who imparts romantic and other advice. At first glance it seems like a vehicle for Plaza’s sharp comedic persona, centered around her signature smart witchy vibe.

So I admit to a bit of a letdown simply based on the fact Plaza isn’t really in the movie very much.

She makes an extended entry at the beginning, is heard through some audio-only interactions and then makes a brief reprise at the end. And rather than doing the April Ludgate thing (after her iconic “Parks and Recreation” role), her character seems more sad than acerbic.

Instead, her younger ass… er, self, is the real star of the show.

Maisy Stella, best known from the “Nashville” show (unseen by me), gives a breakout performance as Elliott, the 18-year-old version of Plaza’s character. She’s a typical teen kid who just wants to get the hell out of her hometown, a small Canadian village centered a large recreational lake, and start her “real life.” Her parents (Maria Dizzia and Alain Goulem) run a small cranberry farm and she has two younger brothers she barely has any relationship with.

Stella’s Elliott is vibrant, brash, a tad judgemental, impatient, passionate and self-involved. In other words, 18 years old. She’s a gay kid who’s not hung up about her sexuality, but pretty centered for her age. She has two close friends, Ruthie and Ro (Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks, respectively), who are clearly her ride-or-die lifers.

It’s not often you encounter a young actress and immediately think, ‘She is so interesting and precocious and distinctive — this is going to be an impressive career.’ Chloë Grace Moretz comes to mind, as does Aubrey Plaza herself.

Maisy Stella is another. This kid — OK, she’s 20, it’s Hollywood — is going places.

Writer/director Megan Park is quite the advanced youngster herself, seguing from starring in a teen TV show to directing shorts and music videos, making her feature debut behind the camera with 2021’s “The Fallout,” which also examined girl attitudes from an insider perspective. She approaches this material with a puckish sense of humor, but if you want to call “My Old Ass” a dramedy, it’s closer to the drama end than the comedy.

As the story opens, it’s summer and Elliott has three weeks left until she leaves for freshman year at the University of Toronto. She doesn’t have much to do, helping her parents out with the farm itinerantly and cruising around the lake in her jon boat. She, Ruthie and Ro score some mushrooms from a friend of a friend, and decide to camp out on a lake island and get stoned.

Elliott is astonished when an older woman appears next to her at the campfire and begins to amiably chat with her — even moreso when she claims to be her very self, 21 years later. Young Elliott’s skepticism is played up by the fact Stella and Plaza don’t look a damn thing like each other, from hair color to height, build and facial structure. Older Elliott writes this off by advising the younger to wear her retainer and focus on skin moisturizing.

Once convinced, young Elliott’s questions of course lean all toward asking about the future, from whether there’s a hot stock she should buy now and the fate of her friends and family. Older self makes a few cryptic observations about things that aren’t around anymore, and is also vague about her own circumstances. What we eventually glean is that she is unmarried, childless (nothing known about cat status) and feeling a bit stuck in life.

Older self goes away when the drugs wear off, but younger discovers that she has put her number into her phone, and they can somehow communicate through voice a text. Don’t bother yourself with tinkering out the metaphysics of how all this works — the movie certainly doesn’t bother. Just accept it, and move on.

Younger Elliott is advised to be nicer to her mother, and work a little harder at getting along with her older brother, Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), a stoic sort who’s really into golf, and nerdy younger sibling Spencer (Carter Trozzolo), who’s a little nosy and very obsessed with actress Saoirse Ronan. And she actually takes this advice to heart, if a little uncomfortably at first.

The one thing older Elliott insists upon is that she absolutely must not, under any circumstances, have anything to do with Chad, who apparently was responsible for some serious trauma to them. Of course, when actual Chad turns up (played by Percy Hynes White), with long hair and a sweet manner and “oddly symmetrical face,” younger Elliott can’t help growing attached to him, despite playing at hating him.

There’s some funny but also very observant stuff about Elliott’s astonishment at finding herself attracted to a guy. She had just assumed at an early age she was a lesbian, and is in fact currently carrying on a dalliance with the young woman at the marina bodega she had longed for. She wonders aloud if this means she’s bisexual or pansexual, and decides the need for labels and how you’re seen by others is not as important as she’d thought — a first step toward becoming older Elliott.

Speaking of, Plaza’s character pretty much disappears entirely from the movie for about 40 minutes and, oddly enough, we find that we don’t miss her as much as we’d thought. This is a story about the younger character, and the older one is just there to light the spark that becomes a flame of self-examination and rethinking her place in the world.

Despite its heftier-than-expected tone, there are still some super-funny sequences that just exist to elicit big laughs. My favorite was a second attempt at getting high to re-summon older Elliott, which becomes a musical sequence homage to Justin Bieber, who Elliott did not crush on at a young age but wanted to be. I think I like her version of “One Less Lonely Girl” than Bieber’s.

“My Old Ass” is a strange, unexpected but lovely movie. Despite its laughs it’s bound to jerk a few tears, and make you think about what it truly means to grow up. Mostly it’s an audacious introduction to Maisy Stella, who could maybe one day become just as mesmerizing a screen presence as Aubrey Plaza.