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The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love’s writer and director, Maria Maggenti, dedicates the film to her “first girlfriend … may our relationship finally rest in peace.” First screened at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, the movie isn’t an elegy for that formative relationship’s demise, though: it’s a charming tribute to the us-against-the-world, near-delusional intensity of a romance’s honeymoon phase. 

It’s made more touching because the people living it are teenagers, unsure of just about everything else in their lives besides their love for each other. The two titular girls in love are Randy and Evie (Laurel Holloman and Nicole Ari Parker), who, when the film starts, are at very different places in their acceptance of their sexualities. Randy has been out — and is an outcast as a result — for years. She presents as butch with boyish red hair and perpetually baggy clothes; she lives with her aunt and her aunt’s girlfriend (Kate Stafford and Sabrina Artel). (Her mother, an ultra-conservative pro-life activist who’s gotten jail time for her belief in her cause, is decisively out of the picture.) Born-rich Evie isn’t out and, until Randy comes into her life, doesn’t quite have the words for why it doesn’t feel right when she’s with her status-obsessed, casually homophobic friend group or the male love interest she can’t seem to entirely clean her hands of. “School’s easy compared to my life,” Evie says tearily early in the film, frustrated with her struggles with love and relationships.

Evie and Randy meet at the latter’s workplace: a gas station where she sometimes also does mechanic work. That skill is put into action when Evie rolls up in the tooth-white Range Rover her dad, always overcompensating ever since he and Evie’s mother divorced, gifted her. Tire troubles suddenly seem inconsequential once Evie and Randy start talking. They have an easy rhythm that betrays, if not immediate romantic possibility, kinship — the kind of mutual understanding that almost takes them aback in its novelty. (One of the most striking things about the relationship that blossoms is how much of it is spent laughing — something it’s clear neither girl does much of in a life where they have to be cautious about how much of themselves they reveal to other people.) 

Nicole Ari Parker and Laurel Holloman in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.

There are obligatory scenes of conflict. Evie’s close-minded friend group summarily dumps her for even suggesting that there might be something between her and Randy. The finale sees the consequences of some bad decision-making — leaving Evie’s mother’s house a mess after a bacchanalian night together, the reveal that Randy’s laxness in her schoolwork is going to result in her not graduating on time — catch up in sitcom-esque fashion. 

But The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is bracing, then and now, for depicting a budding lesbian relationship with such seriousness and warmth, free of any brewing tragedy that often mars fiction about women who love women. Small actions — lazing in some tall grass together on a sunny day while listening to music, holding hands in public — feel as big to the viewer as they do for two girls who know what they want but can’t help but worry about the perception of a potentially hostile public. The film consistently turns almost tactile the way a new romance can inflate even the most minute gesture with grandness. (When Randy says to Evie, “I don’t want to shock you or anything, but I really want to hold your hand right now; I’ve been wanting to hold your hand all day,” I could have shed a tear.) Holloman and Parker, sadly straight in real life, are both excellent, their passion as palpable as their new-at-this jumpiness.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls shares some DNA with the previous year’s Go Fish: it’s a winning, endearingly rough-around-the-edges low-budget movie made by and clearly for someone from the community it portrays that also proved a commercial and critical success. Both were crucial, too, in further pushing lesbian representation out of the film industry’s margins. The movies are also moving without being cloying about it; I love how Two Girls’ closing shot is ambiguous in the kind of way that practically beckons choose-your-own-adventure-style imagination. We don’t know for sure how much longer Evie and Randy’s relationship will go on; part of what makes the film great is its decidedly un-Hollywood conviction that a romance doesn’t have to last forever for it to be magical.