Smooth Talk

Smooth Talk centres on Connie Wyatt, a fifteen-year-old girl in northern California who feels at odds with her family and spends her summer at the beach, at the mall and in casual flirtations. Her uneasy home life, especially her tense relationship with her mother, pushes her toward a freedom she is not ready to handle. That summer she meets Arnold Friend, an older and persuasive stranger whose attention turns her idle rebellion into something far more dangerous.

The film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been", with a screenplay by Tom Cole. Directed by Joyce Chopra, it was the first of the two features listed in her filmography, arriving well before Rip Girls. Laura Dern plays Connie, with Treat Williams as Arnold Friend, Mary Kay Place as her mother Katherine, Levon Helm as her father Harry, Elizabeth Berridge as her sister June and Margaret Welsh as her friend Laura.

Released in 1985 and running just over an hour and a half, the film drew more interest from critics than from general audiences. Its critics' rating stands at 7.5/10 from 31 reviews, while viewers on IMDb have given it 6.6/10 from around 3,800 votes and those on TMDB 6.2/10 from a much smaller number.