NR | 1h 26m | Drama | 2025
Jasmine, known as “Jazzy” (Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux) lives in a trailer park, while her extended family still resides on their Oglala Lakota reservation. Yet she never thinks of herself as poor. All her schoolmates lead similar lives under roughly equivalent conditions. Even the rural white students must ride the same bus for hours just to get to and from school.
That means having a good friend to sit beside largely shapes their quality of life. Unfortunately, quarrelling parents threaten the preteen’s most important relationship in Morissa Maltz’s “Jazzy.”
“Jazzy” represents something like a girl’s version of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” (2014). Maltz filmed Shangreaux and her best friend Syriah (Syriah Fool Head Means) over a six-year period, from ages 6 to 12. Yet the running time for “Boyhood” runs almost 80 minutes longer than the considerably more manageable and economical “Jazzy,” which is definitely a point in its favor.
For the record, “Jazzy” features some returning characters from Maltz’s previous feature “The Unknown Country,” but no advance familiarity with that film is required to fully appreciate “Jazzy.” It is entirely the title girl’s self-contained story. In fact, according to the credits, “Jazzy” is “based on stories by” Shangreaux and Means.
Throughout “Jazzy,” Maltz also deliberately eschews the themes of many typical indigenous-centric independent films. Nobody complains about poverty, per se, because everyone Jazzy knows hails from roughly equivalent rural working-class roots.
Fortunately, subjects like alcoholism and domestic abuse do not intrude into her everyday life either. The film also completely eschews political or ideological content. Arguably, Jazzy has enough to worry about just being a kid.
Jazzy’s world is small in some ways and large in others. Visually, the Black Hills around the municipality of Spearfish seem to infinitely stretch out around her. Yet there is not so much to do in town.
This means, she and her friends usually must find ways to amuse themselves. For a birthday party, 6-year-old Jazzy’s parents rent a room at the local Holiday Inn, so Jazzy and her friends can swim in the pool and enjoy the game room. Elitist Gen-Z New Yorkers might turn up their noses at such a party, but for many Gen-Xers raised in the 1980s, it will look like a good deal of fun.
This party will be a turning point for Jazzy. Soon after, Syriah will assume the critically important designation of her “best friend.” They will remain besties for the next several years and for good reasons. They live next door to each other and share distant family ties.
Emerging Talents
Shangreaux displays an extraordinary screen presence and remarkable poise portraying a semi-fictional version of herself. Means (the granddaughter of Russell Means, the actor and Libertarian Party activist) delivers an incredibly expressive and vulnerable performance as her meta-self.These two young thesps show talent well beyond their years. They also get some wonderfully earnest and down-to-earth support from Landon Adams and Golden Rose, who play their thinly fictionalized friends. They happen to be hardscrabble white kids, but that does not seem to matter. In fact, the smitten Landon clearly carries a torch for Jazzy.
For the most part, the adults are faceless authority figures, who exist outside Maltz’s field of vision, almost like the garbled voices of the grown-ups only heard and never seen in “Charlie Brown” cartoons. There are two notable exceptions. Jazzy bonded with her rebellious Aunt Tana (the Oscar-nominated Lily Gladstone) in “The Unknown Country”; she is one of the few grown-ups who really listens to her niece.
Similarly, Jazzy is one of the more welcoming faces for Tana’s Asian American boyfriend Isaac (Raymond Lee, from the “Quantum Leap” reboot), who remains a subject of extensive family gossip.
Despite the mean economic circumstances of Jazzy’s environment, Maltz’s film is ultimately hopeful. Jazzy and her friends are quite independent and resourceful, which should stand them in good stead when they reach adulthood.
Maltz captures the rhythms of their lives with sensitivity and respect. Frustratingly, the overbearing score off the film’s balance.
Otherwise, “Jazzy” is an impressively grounded and an authentic portrait of rural youths maturing to the cusp of their teen years. Recommended for those who appreciate coming-of-age dramas.
