Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Wing’ on Paramount+, a Teen Dramedy Buoyed by Quality Brooklynn Prince and Brian Cox Performances

Once again, a piece of Susan Orlean journalism becomes a movie in Little Wing (now streaming on Paramount+), which Hollywoodizes her writing into a feelgood dramedy with a little bit of dark fringe. Fans of masterful indie The Florida Project will be happy to see Brooklynn Prince enjoying a starring role, playing an angsty teen who loves Bikini Kill and pigeons with equal aplomb, with Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly as her mother and eternal thespian Brian Cox playing her mentor in bird racing. In helming his first feature since 2017’s floppo Power Rangers reboot, director Dean Israelite has an excellent cast at his disposal, and even though he struggles to establish the tonal consistency of a somewhat complex story, it might be worth a watch anyway.

LITTLE WING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Kaitlyn (Prince) via voiceover that’s rather overwhelmingly in the Sullen Teen vein: “I guess everyone lies to themselves,” she says. “When was the last time I was happy?,” she says. “The school therapist said everyone feels overwhelmed. It’s normal. I’m feeling really normal right now,” she says. You get the picture. Her parents are divorcing, and the fallout is so: Her dad already has moved out. Her older brother Matt (Simon Khan) barely says a word anymore. Her mother (Reilly) can’t afford the house on her own, and is putting it up for sale. This last one is a real bone of contention for Kaitlyn, who doesn’t want to move. It might be the only thing she almost likes in this world, since she drips angst all over everything like a sappy tree sludging up the roof and gutters. She doesn’t want to do her school research project, she doesn’t want to fit in with her fellow eighth graders, she doesn’t want to participate in gym-class dodgeball so she just lets herself get beaned, and she doesn’t want to move. Life!

One night, Mom, who’s a police detective, invites her boss and his wife over for dinner. He gives Kaitlyn two racing pigeons, which is sweet, since she probably needs something to focus on besides her misery, but we pragmatists are all like, cool, they can’t afford the house, and now she has an expensive hobby! Now here’s the theory that she – and therefore we – learns about these pigeons: You let them go and they come back and nobody really understands how or why, but some experts believe they love their homes and bond tightly with them, and therefore always return. There’s the metaphor for you. Is Kaitlyn like a pigeon? Her brother insists that their house is now associated with the pain of their family falling apart. But she really really really doesn’t want to move, possibly because it’d be very difficult to take down all the anime and riot grrrl posters covering her walls. So yes, I think she’s like a pigeon, but it stops at her deep admiration for Kathleen Hanna, because I’ve yet to meet a pigeon who likes Kathleen Hanna.

In Kaitlyn’s research about racing pigeons, she comes across this guy Jaan (Cox), who found his pigeon niche and so mightily filled it, he’s the subject of entire magazine articles. He possesses a champion racing pigeon – the movie doesn’t really get into the details of pigeon racing, but I gleaned that pigeon people let their pigeons go and the fastest pigeon to return wins – dubbed The Granger, which is worth $120,000. Kaitlyn starts doing the math: It would take $100,000 to pay off the house. And this Jaan guy lives right here in Portland. All she has to do is recruit her bestie Adam (Che Tafari) to help her steal The Granger from Jaan’s rooftop pigeon sanctuary, then sell the pigeon to the “Russian pigeon mafia,” and it’s too bad that the movie never really leans into the inherent comedy of something so loony as the “Russian pigeon mafia.” As you’d fully expect, nothing goes quite as planned, but it at least inspires an Unusual Friendship between Kaitlynn and Jaan, who grants her some grace as a desperate and morally confused teen, and works with her instead of calling the cops. And as always happens in movies bearing the weight of overcalculated plots, this Unusual Friendship brings life lessons and wisdom and all the stuff that young Kaitlynn needs. Would she ever be able to come of age without it? I doubt it!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, Moxie paid better homage to Bikini Kill. As far as Orlean-derived films go — the movie’s screenplay was based on Orleans’ 2006 article in The New Yorker —  Little Wing has more in common with Blue Crush than Adaptation (partly because Adaptation has almost nothing in common with any other movie ever made). I also occasionally felt it leaning toward the substantial teen-angst insights of relatively recent coming-of-age masterpieces The Edge of Seventeen and Eighth Grade – purely Prince’s doing; more on that in a moment – but the screenplay just isn’t up to the task. 

Performance Worth Watching: Prince is absolutely worthy of a load-bearing role (here’s another reminder that her breakout in The Florida Project is revelatory), and seeing her hold her own across from a beloved vet like Cox is the highlight of the film.

Memorable Dialogue: This script likes to give Cox cliches to recite: “We’re all dying. Some of us are just doing it faster than everyone else.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Little Wing never really finds its footing narratively, careening from understated comedy to cliched sentimentality and overheated melodrama, from awkward John Hughesish high-school social complexities to light neo-modern feminism and the stuff of midnight heist movies, with a heavy-duty teen-suicide subplot tossed in almost haphazardly. Which is to say, it’s un. Even. Two words. With periods. Israelite can’t find a happy medium between Cox Oscar clipping with welcome gravitas and Tafari channeling the broadly comic tones of a Disney sitcom. John Gatins’ screenplay doesn’t fully commit to the teen-diary narration, which feels extraneous and overly explanatory, flattening Kaitlyn’s character dynamic and preventing Prince from exploring her character nonverbally. It commits the cardinal sin of movies by telling instead of showing.  

Yet there’s a deeply endearing quality to Prince’s performance; she’s one of those performers who, when they cry, you can’t help but cry with them, and she delivers during a critical third-act scene that might’ve been high fructose corn syrup in the hands of other teen actors. She and Cox manage to overcome the clunky central metaphor (let’s not forget, Kaitlynn is like a pigeon), cliche landmines (a dying-of-cancer revelation) and a number of plot credibility issues (the plan to steal The Granger back from the “Russian pigeon mafia” is especially ridiculous, and not only because none of the characters even considers being quiet during the after-dark heist) and find some traction in their grandfather-granddaughter dynamic. As written on the page, their characters are thin, but they nevertheless radiate enough warmth and prickly dynamics to inspire our concern for Kaitlynn and Jaan’s well-being. There’s an overriding notion that the unusual circumstance between these two characters is a contrivance we only see in the movies, but when actors like Cox and Prince breathe a little life into their parts anyway, it feels like a small miracle.

Our Call: Little Wing lives and dies by its performances – and Cox and Prince hurdle tonal inconsistencies well enough to make the movie work, sometimes in spite of itself. STREAM IT.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.