Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival just days after Trump clarified his Make America Great Again agenda, Sophie Hyde’s “Jimpa” is a film about progress, not going back. Inspired by lessons of living with an activist gay father (John Lithgow’s richest role since “The World According to Garp”) and a nonbinary child (Aud Mason-Hyde), the semi-autobiographical drama captures — and celebrates — the ripple effects of the Sexual Revolution across three generations.
With its inclusion-minded ensemble, frank and occasionally frustrating ”woke”-abulary and tradition-bending “gender ideology,” “Jimpa” feels as “Sundance” as any film in this year’s festival. Hyde, who hails from Australia, taps Olivia Colman to play her on-screen counterpart, Hannah, an indie filmmaker whose “mostly” monogamous marriage to a straight, cisgender man (Daniel Henshall) is the closest the film gets to showing a heteronormative couple. Gay men may teasingly refer to such people as “breeders,” but the fact is, in this family, Grandpa Jim — or “Jimpa,” as he prefers to be called — fathered two kids before coming out in the early ’70s.
In a tricky-to-follow expository prologue, delivered as a presentation by Frances (Mason-Hyde) to their school’s LGBTQIA+ students club, Jim and his wife challenged convention by staying together. That worked for a while, until Jim decided to relocate to Amsterdam — a rift that Hannah still resents nearly four decades later. Jim still lives half a world away, but isn’t the same since his first stroke, so Hannah, her husband, Harry, and 16-year-old Frances have all decided to visit. Unbeknownst to their parents, Frances hopes to make this a one-way trip, intending to stay on with Jimpa.
While that would be drama enough to sustain many a Sundance movie, Hannah — who is pitching a project that sounds suspiciously like the one Hyde has made — insists that the very thing that makes her family unique is how amicably everyone deals with life’s curveballs. “They chose kindness over conflict,” Hannah explains, although there’s no shortage of the latter, as she juggles a child tentatively seeking independence and an infirm (and carelessly unfiltered) father.
Granted, Hannah and her sister, Emily (Kate Box), separated-but-civil parents and gender-questioning child seem exceptionally comfortable in one another’s presence (good luck finding another body-conscious teen willing to share a bath with their mom), demonstrating the kind of mature, tactful communication meant to respect the feelings of all involved. But that doesn’t mean they always see eye-to-eye. Disputes are not only normal but necessary — a notion the always provocative Jimpa takes impish delight in testing.
Hyde’s artsy, category-defying film can feel a bit chaotic at times, crammed with distracting splinters of key memories (unnecessary flashbacks in which different-looking younger actors embody the same character). In real life, her daughter Aud (who plays Frances) didn’t get to spend as much quality time with Jimpa as the movie suggests, which makes “Jimpa” a lovely — if weirdly self-indulgent — chance to correct that. While Hannah’s a fiercely supportive ally, one can only imagine the conversations Aud might have had with her politically engaged, HIV-positive ancestor.
“Jimpa” sets out to make those missed opportunities possible, providing not just Aud but an entire generation of young people with insights into the struggles their thick-skinned elders endured so that they might come out of the closet in relative comfort. Hyde finds humor in the way hypersensitive millennials take such things for granted, while also poking gentle fun at how slow her father’s generation can be to wrap their heads around self-chosen pronouns and the letters that come after “LGBT” in the queer alphabet. (Even the term “queer” comes under question, as Jimpa’s friends recall when that was “the word you heard right before they beat you up.”)
But the film is mostly affirmational, praising the way today’s open-minded youth are rewriting the codes of courtship: “You can’t assume anything about anyone. You have to ask what they want,” Jimpa tells his “grand-thing,” as he calls his gender-rejecting descendant. It’s a lot for any parent to keep track of, and Hannah does her best, learning new words (like “compersion”) from her daughter, defined here as “the opposite of jealousy.” Hannah and her husband aren’t quite there themselves, and an unclear subplot — which finds Hannah sharing moments of intimacy with her father’s lover-cum-assistant, Richard (Eamon Farren) — suggests they still have much to learn from their boundary-testing relatives.
To her credit, Hannah doesn’t even freak out when Frances expresses interest in a slightly older and significantly more experienced woman. Instead of coming straight to Mom after losing their virginity, Frances tells their grandfather first. He offers his approval, plus a THC gummy to mark the occasion. Colman is excellent, as usual, indicating the complicated and sometimes contradictory emotions the trip unearths, as Frances shifts their trust to a father who wasn’t always as caring with Hannah. But instead of feeling envy, she embraces their bond — compersion as more than just a “poly thing.”
The acting feels genuine across the board, with Lithgow (who wrestles an impossible-to-geolocate accent) emerging as the most fearless in an all-around daring ensemble, appearing fully naked in his late 70s. Reminiscent of Emma Thompson’s mirror scene in Hyde’s 2022 film “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” but treated with a knowing dash of absurdity, Jimpa’s acceptance of his body signals a hard-fought battle to embrace his identity. What’s the point of gay pride if one is governed by shame? Jimpa takes that unapologetic self-love to extremes, but if even an iota of his confidence wears off on Frances, it’ll be a good thing.
