The name “Nicola Peltz Beckham” likely conjures different associations, depending on your frame of reference. Pop culture hounds likely know her as the heiress to a billion-dollar fortune who also married Brooklyn Beckham—the wannabe-chef son of David and Victoria Beckham—and whose billionaire father subsequently sued the wedding planner. Avatar fans who have not somehow memory-holed M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender might remember Nicola as a less-than-convincing Katara; and right-wing weirdos might think of her as That One Girl Who Had Ron DeSantis Uninvited from Her Wedding. If you’re me, you might’ve just found out about her existence less than an hour ago.
Whatever first introduced you to Nicola Peltz Beckham, however, prepare to know her by another name—Lola.
Friends, the time has come for Peltz’s directorial debut. And just in time for her 29th birthday, we’ve all been given the gift of its first trailer.
This movie appears to lie somewhere at the nexus of Euphoria, The Florida Project, and a Tumblr mood board. Peltz Beckham, who wrote and directed the film in which she also stars, will play a 19 year old named (you guessed it) Lola, who stares down all of the trauma that life has to offer by hanging out a car window and smoking a cigarette while her dead eyes stare at something 1,000 miles in the distance.
Academy Award nominee Virginia Madsen (Sideways) takes on the hefty role of Lola’s abusive mother, while Luke David Blumm plays her younger brother, Arlo—whose penchant for make-up and jewelry does not appear to sit well with his mother and her violent temper.
“Set in 2002 Middle America,” the film’s description reads, “Lola revolves around nineteen-year-old Lola James (Peltz Beckham) who is desperately working to save enough money to get her little brother, Arlo (Luke David Blumm), out of their toxic home dominated by their mother, Mona (Madsen). All Lola wants is for Arlo to have a chance at the life she never had, nor will. One tragic night her whole world gets uprooted, and from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same.”
… And because that wasn’t enough, at some point, Lola also becomes pregnant.
Lola, 2024
Vertical Entertainment
From its hyper-saturated color palette, to the 19-year-old-girl-on-a-stripper-pole routine, to the early-aughts nostalgia (of course Lola and her friend are singing “No Scrubs” in the car), this trailer is practically screaming “Gen Z catnip.” Its plot, meanwhile, seems to have ripped several pages out of the Intense and Important Film Playbook.
Lola loves her younger brother, and they both seem to live in fear of their mother—whom we see cutting off Arlo’s long hair in the trailer after calling him a “f****t.” (“Don’t ever fucking call him that again,” Lola warns, just before their mother calls out “sinner!” and unloads a guttural shriek.) While their mother is convinced she’s been “on the road to sin” for a long time, Lola mostly mostly seems to be trying to figure out how to make enough money to move herself and Arlo far, far away. And yes, the trailer does include the requisite shots of Lola snorting some sort of drug in despair and her brother running in tears down a darkened street, presumably after a climactic moment of conflict, while their mother’s voice insists, “You’ll never be good enough.”
Lola, 2024
Vertical Entertainment
And then, just when you think you’ve got this movie figured out, Peltz Beckham seems to adopt a new, or at least much stronger, accent—is that a New Jersey twang? Long Island? I thought we were in “Middle America”!—as she tells her mother, “I’m gonna spend my entire life making sure my baby knows what it feels like to be loved.”
“I said the same thing,” her mother counters, “when I was pregnant with you.”
From the trailer, Lola seems like it might very well be a contrived daydream concocted by someone who thinks that being broke in “Middle America” means having backwards parents, becoming pregnant as a teen, and wearing a smokey eye at all times of the day. Then again, who knows? Plenty of nepo-baby directors have proven their own talents over the years, including Sofia Coppola, Rob Reiner, and Brandon Cronenberg. Perhaps this 29-year-old billionaire heiress from Westchester County, New York, has a deeper truth to share. The good news is, we’ll all soon be able to find out when the film premieres in theaters and on VOD Feb. 9.
