@Tom_Shone
INWARD LOOKING: Mills, photographed for Newsweek in New York in December, came to directing late. Two lms in, he’s going his own, eccentric way.
BENEDICT EVANS FOR NEWSWEEK
MIKE MILLS’S new film, 20th Century Women, is about many things—skateboarding, Talking Heads, the confusion and loneliness of being a teenager, Susan Sontag, feminism, Jimmy Carter’s crisis of confidence speech. “My films can start out as little weird constellations, and then you kind of add another piece,” Mills says, perched on an egg-shaped red chair at the New York City offices of the indie film company A24. The closest the film comes to a hook is this: What is it like to be a young teenage boy raised in a household of women? Or, as someone in the movie asks, “Do you need a man to raise a man?”