June 24, 2026 at 3:39pm EDT

The teens who watched Hayley Kiyoko’s Girls Like Girls music video on loop and reblogged stills on Tumblr are in their late 20s now, but never too old to enjoy the singer’s long-awaited feature-length film of the same name with a younger generation of teenagers.

The queer drama stars Maya da Costa as Coley, a sullen teenager newly living with her estranged father, Zach Braff, and Myra Molloy as Sonya, the magnetic “cool” girl Coley befriends and falls for. The two become fast friends before their relationship becomes ambiguously romantic, conveying all the butterflies and hair-raising feelings that come with having a crush.

The story is simple and, in its simplicity, hammers on the point Kiyoko made in her original 2015 song, “Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new.”

For da Costa and Molloy, the film was a celebration of falling in love with yourself as much as it was about falling in love with a crush.

“Falling in love before 100% knowing yourself can be incredibly volatile at times,” says da Costa. “I think it working on this movie just reminded me how precious that experience is, and that no one should be able to take that away from you.”

“To be seen is to be loved,” Molloy adds. “When you surrender to love, you become who you really are.”

Molloy said that working on the film was a lesson in drowning out other people’s opinions. “There’s so much noise in this world, we have so many expectations for ourselves, for other people, we have other people judging and having expectations of us, there’s so much noise. I just feel like we need to just go back to the basics. Love wholeheartedly, fully hard love hard, and then you’ll really, you’ll just come back to who you really are at the core.”