Its legality, its prevalence, its acceptance by many Americans is as crucial a part of the movie as the action onscreen, but “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” doesn’t offer any useful or meaningful political or social context for the action. The movie’s depiction of conversion therapy aptly stokes outrage at the cruelty that it inflicts upon the teens who are subjected to it, but the movie’s artistic vision isn’t up to the passions, the politics, and the conflicts that it evokes.Ĭonversion therapy, as a title card states, is currently legal in most states its very existence is at the center of the movie, but it’s not the sole subject.
(So is permission to decorate the wall of her dorm room.) She and the dozen or so other teens interned in the facility are forced to take part in group “therapy” sessions in which their “same-sex attraction” is avowed and its causes traced, and in which their personalities are criticized, their desires suppressed, their very identities denied. From the start, she learns that her contact with the outer world, by phone and mail, is cut off-these are “privileges” that she’ll have to earn. There, Cameron discovers and endures atrocities. Cameron is quickly delivered by her aunt (Kerry Butler), who is also her guardian (Cameron is an orphan), to a Christian conversion-therapy facility called God’s Promise. Both attend the end-of-year homecoming dance with boys when they sneak off to a car in the parking lot, they’re caught having sex by Cameron’s date. She is in a sexual relationship with another girl from school, Coley (Quinn Shephard), but they’re secretive about it. “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” Desiree Akhavan’s new movie, is a drama, set in 1993, starring Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role of a teen-age girl who has just finished tenth grade in a suburban high school in Pennsylvania.