The best thing about this movie, hands-down, is its two lead actors, Bening and Moore, who play a long-term lesbian couple (Nic and Jules, respectively) who have raised two children together. Their oldest child, Joni, has just graduated high school and is preparing to leave for college in the Fall. Laser, their son, is only 15 years old and begs his half-sister Joni to do him a favor (Nic and Jules each carried one of the children, both using the same sperm donor). Laser feels a little lost in this household of women and wants to try to locate his sperm-donor father. However, since he is not yet 18, he needs his sister to make the call to the sperm bank.

Enter Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an easy-spirit, motorcycle-riding guy in his late 30s who is somewhat recently getting serious about his life. He owns his own restaurant and runs an organic co-op. Otherwise, he is not tied down in any relationship and seems happy this way. Paul is surprisingly open and unruffled about meeting his unexpected offspring.

This somewhat unbelievable turn of events is pulled together nicely by the amazing performances of Bening and Moore. Their relationship is so believable, from their comfortable routine at the dinner table to their hilarious bedroom intimacy, I felt like I knew them within the first ten minutes of the film.

As the children meet Paul, and eventually the mothers meet him as well, the conversations and character play is also very believable. Maybe even a little dull in its believability. But with such an unlikely premise at its core, you are carried along by the suspense of where these relationships could possibly go.

Ultimately, the exchange between the family and Paul pushes each character in different directions, testing their relationships with each other and forcing them to accept certain things about themselves and one another.

I was pleasantly surprised by the lightness of this film. Cholodenko was so very kind to her characters, letting them be human and screw up, but giving them a wonderfully deep and generous inner self. For me, it felt like a pretty big departure from High Art and Laurel Canyon, both of which were fairly dark in content and character. Though I am huge fan of High Art, I was glad that The Kids was not only a different kind of story, but was given a completely unique stage on which to present its very unreal story and its extraordinarily sympathetic characters.

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