This image released by A24 shows Annette Bening (left), and Lucas Zade Zumann in ‘20th Century Woman.’ (AP)

NEW YORK, Oct 8, (Agencies): Director Mike Mills had some advice for his audience at the New York Film Festival: Make a movie about your mom.

Mills premiered his “20th Century Woman”, starring Annette Bening, on Friday at Lincoln Center, where his film is playing as the festival’s centerpiece. In it, Bening stars as Dorothea Fields, a woman born during the Great Depression who’s raising her 14-year-old son (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) by herself in 1979 California, albeit with the help of the colorful tenants (Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup) living her old Santa Barbara home.

The film is a lushly lived-in coming-of-age dramedy about a mom and her son, told with a keen eye to how historical currents shape emotional lives. Mills, at a press conference Friday, said the movie could be reduced to “’As Time Goes By’ meets the Buzzcocks.”

Mills, the writer-director of “Beginners”, said he wrote “20th Century Woman” primarily as a love letter to his mother.

“You all should make movies about your mom because it’s really a trip”, said Mills. “And then have an amazing actress do it.”

The film, which A24 will release Dec 25, has been lined up as an awards season contender, with Bening’s lead performance particularly trumpeted. Her Dorothea is part a cigarette-smoking traditionalist (she tells her son: “Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to being depressed”), and part an open-minded child of the 1960s, willing to try dancing to both the Talking Heads and Black Flag.

Bening was 19 during the film’s time period, but grew up in San Diego near the movie’s coastal setting.

“My world was a different world than this world that I grew up in, but the time was the same”, said Bening. “I loved the script because I thought it contextualized that period for me in a way that I had never seen.”

The challenge of playing the part, Bening said, was in finding the character herself while also being faithful to Mills’ descriptions of his mother. The balancing act, she said, was “fascinating but not easy.”

“To me Dorothea was very much Annette, in body and timing and soul”, said Mills. “It was fun to sort of show her my mom, always saying to her to take what’s interesting and dump the rest.”

Mills said he was inspired not just by his mother, but other women in his life, who he interviewed almost like a journalist. Their stories informed other characters and scenes.

“I’m very much trying to base everything on real women”, said Mills. “Ultimately, I’m a straight white cisgender male guy trying to write about women, but I can only go so far. I’m on the outside looking in. I was trying to make those limitations of my perspective part of the story.”

Authentic

“20th Century Woman” is set in Santa Barbara, Calif, during the summer of 1979, and the movie is pinpoint authentic about the signposts of that era: the short shorts and halter tops, the Ford Mavericks and Galaxies and aging VW Beetles, the early use of words like “compartmentalize”, and what it looked and felt like when the Clash and Talking Heads and Devo were leaking into the mainstream, and sleeping around was the new middle-class normal, and a girl could cut her hair like David Bowie and streak it bottle-red without coming off like a freak, and feminism had lost its militant edge but was now (more than ever) remaking the world, and rock clubs were desultory dungeons that still seemed like the most exciting places on Earth because anything could happen in them. As a state of mind, 1979 was the last moment of calm before the counterrevolution — the takeover of the culture by money fever, fashion, and Reaganite unreality — and in “20th Century Woman”, Mills gets a lot of that right. But not all of it.

The factor that complicates the movie’s authenticity is that even though “20th Century Woman” is an original piece of work, Mills’ dialogue still makes it sound like he’s adapting some novel of disaffected whimsy by Michael Chabon. His writing is always on — on point, on the nose, on the joke. That worked in “Beginners”, because the Plummer character was such a card (he was always on), and it works like a charm with Bening, who puts the perfect jaded spin on lines like, “Wondering if you’re happy is just a shortcut to being depressed.” But the movie is also the coming-of-age story of 15-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) — i.e., the curly-haired lost-puppy Mike Mills character — and the two young women in his life: Julie (Elle Fanning), his 17-year-old best friend, who comes over to snuggle in bed but refuses to get sexual with him; and Abbie (Greta Gerwig), the rouge-dyed Bowie-head, a passionate and aimless 24-year-old art photographer who’s renting the room upstairs. At moments, these two could almost be Jamie’s sisters, because Mills writes the kind of entertaining but promiscuously clever repartee that makes everyone seem a little too glibly like “family.” Try as he might, his voice isn’t the voice of the lackadaisical late ‘70s — it’s the voice of knowing indie adorableness.

The best thing about the movie is Bening’s performance as Dorothea Fields, who’s portrayed as a very particular kind of contradictory free spirit. Divorced and proud, with a lot of heart and soul but even more over-sharing flakiness, Dorothea lives with Jamie in a big ramshackle Victorian house that she’s having renovated (a process that looks like it’s never going to end; in fact, it looks like it’s barely going to get started). She says whatever’s on her mind, and that marks her as a spiky counterculture type — though she isn’t nearly as receptive to what’s on everyone else’s mind. Bening nails that narcissism, and makes Dorothea a moonstruck charmer because of it. The character is 55 years old and, on some level, still stuck in the world of “Casablanca” and dancing cheek-to-cheek. She’s a chain-smoker who thinks smoking won’t hurt her because it wasn’t dangerous when she started (it was romantic), and she’s devoted to the stock market, obsessing over IBM and Xerox. When she hears a punk song by the Raincoats, it makes her just about break out in hives. Bening plays her as a rigid free spirit, a control freak in Birkenstocks.

The movie’s rather grandiose title is the tipoff to what Mills is up to. Jamie, a loner who likes to skateboard around town, is haunted by the absence of his father and the overwhelming embrace of his mother. He’s a passive agent — and not, in the end, a very electrifying character.