There are quite a few movies out there about troubled youth, some more accurate than others. This one is exceptionally accurate. The story follows Emily, a girl who is forced to deal with things she doesn't know how to deal with emotionally, who meets the wrong people at the wrong time and ends up being very disconnected from the world around her. Rather than following her 'fall from grace' like many other movies have done, this movie skips ahead to a later stage in the life of one who got lost. She's at the point where her life has already fallen apart and she decides to just run away from it all. This allows the story to deal at length with finding her way back, rather than hastily going over that part of the process.
From a very early point in the movie onward, the strongest aspect of the movie becomes crystal clear: The director and the female lead are masterful at breathing life into a character who is terribly out of place in the world, who lost her ability to re-connect with it, and any of the happiness it could have brought her. You can SEE the inner dialogue going on inside the mind of Emily, written on her face. You can see how the appearance of this girl doesn't fit with the people around her, and how neither she nor those people, know what to do about it. That is, until she meets the male lead, who acts differently from the other people in her life. To it's credit, the story leaves it open for a good while why he's willing to help her. This puts the viewer in the same position as Emily, not knowing if he's helping her, or just trying to hit on her, or something else. And even though he seems happy-go-lucky, that just makes it harder for Emily to connect with him, because she is anything but happy-go-lucky.
I won't give away how things pan out, but I can tell you that the story doesn't pull it's punches. It will play a little with the standard story telling structure to play with your expectations near the end, which is a most welcome thing in a time when a lot of writers follow the standard story formulas religiously. The weak point of the movie is, in fact, the one time where I feel the story was indeed trying to follow standard story telling structure regardless of what that would mean for the realism of the characters. I don't want to give away what happens, but odds are you'll recognize it when you see it.
Showing how hard it is to allow positivity back into a negative life is very difficult to pull off because most of that happens in someone's thoughts and feelings. The directing, and acting of the female lead does this extremely well. That alone is enough to make this movie good. It allows the story to be told well in spite of a relatively low budget. If a movie can make you not too concerned with things like lower quality sound because it tells it's story well, someone is doing something right.
Keep a close eye on the future efforts of the lead actress, Ebony Nave. She has what it takes.