‘Miss Stevens’ Review: Teacher-Student Drama Scores High Grade

Lily Rabe excels as a high school teacher struggling with her investment in the lives of her students in this sharply turned first feature

Much harder to pull off is what the fizzy, melancholic charmer “Miss Stevens” does with its tale of a young high school English teacher (a superb Lily Rabe) chaperoning three students of varying personalities and problems on a weekend trip, and that’s acknowledge that the boundary between instructor and charge is a necessary but complicated one.

First-time feature director Julia Hart, working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Jordan Horowitz, and drawing from her own experiences teaching high school students, has created a small gem about the kind of emotional investment going on (one hopes) every day in the educational system, as well as its toll.

Though small-scale almost to a fault — at times it feels more like a loosely stitched collection of scenes than a fully threaded movie — “Miss Stevens” bears a maturity and genuineness that thankfully feels miles apart from the inspirational assembly line of Hollywood product.

(Discussing Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with her students, she likens school to “an institution,” and clearly means it.) That day she’s warned by the principal (Oscar Nuñez, “The Office”) that one of her charges, Billy (Timothée Chalamet, “Interstellar”), suffers from a behavioral disorder that requires medication.

Rachel clearly enjoys the chance to drink a little, tell a personal story to the kids over dinner, then, later at a mixer, turn the attentions of a married fellow teacher (Rob Huebel) into a one-night stand.

A morning spent with him in tow, dealing with a flat tire and getting a meal, leads to a conversation about mutual loneliness, with Rachel eventually muttering, “How are we talking about this?”

The movie’s emotional fulcrum is a late-night hotel room visit between a distraught Rachel and a comforting Billy that Hart pitches at a rightly uncomfortable tone, but one that’s also truly touching.

Rounding out the key cast, Reinhart and Quintal provide enough humor and sincerity to avoid what could have been stereotypes, and Huebel segues nicely from weekend adulterer to daytime cynic, telling a flustered Rachel in a moment of shoptalk that he’s lasted as long as he has in education by following a simple, protective philosophy: care about the outside — kids’ grades, their future success — but avoid the inside.