Mouse is particularly attuned to how a teenager’s dissatisfaction can attach itself to almost anything: imperfect skin, house clutter, a mother’s manner of speaking. The clothes and interiors do more than evoke an era; they reveal how Minnie sees herself and the life she wishes were hers.
O’Sullivan wanted the period embedded in her characters’ lives rather than presented as a cartoon version of the early 2000s. That required thinking about how trends actually reached teenagers there. “Arkansas wouldn’t be on the cutting edge of fashion in 2002,” she observes.
Grace, who grew up in Arkansas around the same time, recalls the stores available to her: JCPenney, Sears, Walmart, Big Lots, Kmart. “We might have all wanted to look like what we saw on TV, but what did you actually have access to?” she asks. You might wait until Christmas to ask for a shirt you’d coveted for six months. “That might be the one thing in your closet that’s really stylish, and then you make it work with everything else.”
Photo: Courtesy of Nate Hurtsellers and Luke Dyra. An Independent Film Company Release.
For research, Grace consulted O’Sullivan’s yearbooks and pressed friends to unearth old photographs, including shots from their first digital cameras. “None of us knew how to put an outfit together,” she says, smiling. The challenge was to create looks that appeared as though a teenager had put them together with limited options and a still-developing sense of style.
