Saoirse Ronan Is That Cool Girl From Your High School in ‘Lady Bird’ Trailer

Regardless of whether you went to Catholic school or not, in your teenage years, you knew a Lady Bird. They’re everywhere, flouting the rules in the name of creative expression or just boundary-testing for its own sake, clever but too unfocused or unmotivated for their own good. There’s something eminently familiar about even the first sample of Saoirse Ronan’s performance as Lady Bird, the title character in actress-writer Greta Gerwig’s directorial feature debut. In her smart-ass answer that of course Lady Bird is her given name, as she gave it to herself, a viewer instantly recognizes that girl from high school.

In a role already generating Oscar murmurs from the film’s premiere at Telluride Film Festival earlier this week, Ronan portrays a rebellious senior at a small-town Catholic academy with aspirations of parts east. If only she didn’t have grades too dismal for the likes of Harvard or Yale. But while questioning her own faith and getting into constant drag-down arguments with her combative mother (Laurie Metcalf, commanding the screen as per usual), she goes through the usual milestones of adolescent coming-of-age. Namely, unfulfilling sex.

Rounding out the cast are Tracy Letts as Lady Bird‘s father, and stars-on-the-rise Lucas Hedges (Manchester By the Sea) and Timothée Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) as potential romantic opposites in Lady Bird’s orbit. From the pedigree to the solid one-liners littered throughout the trailer, there’s plenty of reason to keep an eye out for this when it hits theaters on November 10. After last year’s Little Sister and Edge of Seventeen, this marks a third empathetic look into teenage girlhood — at what point are we allowed to officially declare a Golden Age?