Our Song is a thing of quiet beauty. Storywise, this second feature from director Jim McKay (Girls Town) is about the subtle breakdown of a friendship between three young girls in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Their lives revolve around fairly typical teenage stuff, and the film catches all three in a prototypically teenage moment of end-of-summer transition, during which the girls begin to outgrow one another. This tumultuous time is set against the teeming backdrop of the city, and more specifically, a rigorous youth center's marching band, of which all three girls are members.

Shot in documentary style, Our Song strives lovingly to portray the kitchen-sink realism of working-class urban life. But the environmental context is just that: context. The real dramatic heft of the film comes from the outstanding performances of the three girls (Kerry Washington, Anna Simpson, and Melissa Martinez) as their characters undergo inarticulate transformations while navigating the sociopolitical gestalt that surrounds them. Where Girls Town felt hyperintentional and actor-y (though still effective), Our Song feels deeply natural, gently observed, almost accidental--a strong testament to the power of the writing, and to the unorthodox and collaborative nature of the project itself.

In Our Song, and to a lesser extent Girls Town, the naturalistic environment is a key element. How do you go about creating realism?

Well, I guess it kind of permeates every aspect of the making. It starts with the writing, just trying to get things very, very true to life. I specifically wanted you to feel like you were there, in a way, and so I paid real attention to very, very minute details about how people speak and how people pause and how people say things without being specific, and tried to reflect those things in the script. Then all the choices we made... the girls did their own hair and makeup, they chose a lot of their own costume stuff. We didn't have a production designer, we just shot on locations and every once in a while moved something that was out of place, but for the most part really shot it like a documentary. And I think all those things, combined with the non-plot-dependency of the script, hopefully add up to the thing that I guess I was trying to get at, which was the submersion in this moment in time. I'm really proud of Girls Town, I just definitely feel like I got better with the second movie and learned a lot. And it's also a different kind of movie. That movie, for very good and specific reasons, kind of wore its politics on its sleeve. I wanted to make an activist film. I wanted to make a film that made Statements. With this film, I wanted to steer away from that and try as best I could to put all those issues below the surface.

Which is a subtler and maybe even more effective form of activism, in the sense that working-class kids rare-ly get to see themselves portrayed in any sort of realistic, respectful way. Part of that realism is the sense of danger in their urban environment. They have these zones of comfort (around their families and friends, and especially their band), but in moving between those zones--little girls in this big city--they seem really vulnerable.

I don't know how really, really conscious it was in the creation, but I definitely do think that there's always a certain amount of tension underneath the surface. There are no identifiable bad guys chasing them down; they're more like environmental circumstances that are very present but invisible.

In a conventional urban drama, you expect that underriding tension to yield some sort of climax that defines the end of the friendship or a specific hardship they have to endure.

Well, it's interesting when you show the film to audiences and get responses. I think that movies have become so predictable that people's expectations have begun to match up with them. There's a scene at the end of the movie where one of the characters is just sort of walking, and we walk with her for a while; so many people have come up to me and said, "We were so worried--we thought she was gonna get shot!" It's a culmination of this underlying tension you're talking about--like, "Are they gonna be okay?"--but it also has to do with expectations. "Oh, it's near the end of the movie, I guess one of these characters is gonna have to die."

In a way, though, that scene is a climax, in regard to the story about two friends growing up and apart. The fact that the camera stays on her so long does make you feel like something is about to happen to her. But in fact, something is happening to her, and she may not even know.

I really went to great pains to not tie things up. A lot of the movie is about friendship, and more often than not, when we lose a friendship it doesn't happen in some kind of blowout where everything is articulated; it kind of fizzles and uncomfortably ends. And that's what happens here.

The real lead character in the film is the marching band, which is both a project and a destination for the girls within this frequently hostile urban environment. That the safest place should be such a demanding atmosphere is a really interesting collision.

It's funny, how symbolically necessary and perfect it was, but again, that's real life. How the girls are shown and the function they serve exactly echoes the real band. Here's a place that, for a lot of these kids, serves as the antithesis of everything they have going on around them. When we were filming, we did a little "making of" documentary and we talked to a lot of the kids in the neighborhood. I remember specifically this interview with one young girl who was maybe six or seven. We were shooting at night, and she was asked where her mom was. And she said, "She's at work, she'll be home later." "Well, what are you going to do?" "I'm gonna wait for her to come home." She had been told to wait at the playground till 11:00, with no money for food. It was just kind of amazing to me. And for her, it was worth only a shrug. Well, now it's two years later and she's in the band, and now she has a place to go when she gets out of school. Not till 11:00, but for a good, solid part of the day she has someone there. And it was important to me, while talking to her, not to jump to some kind of judgment about what her mom was doing. I have no idea what [her mom's] circumstances were. Maybe the fact that she's working till 11:00 is the one thing that's keeping things together for that kid, for that house, whatever. That's not the crucial thing to me. The crucial thing is, given these circumstances, are there other ways these kids can get support? And the band is exactly that for them.

What draws you to the lives of young people as an observer? And young girls in particular?

Well, I went to college to be a high-school English teacher. I never ended up doing it, but that's where my interests still are, in terms of a great respect for and love of young people. And more recently, the position of young people in society has changed greatly, to the point where we now have words like "predator" associated with them, and they've really been demonized in a lot of ways. I don't see them that way and I think there's a lot of other adults in the world who don't see them that way. I just kind of cheer for them in a way, in my own life. I really am on their side. They don't have that much out there to represent them. There's certainly nothing about young people of color. I mean, there was Mi Vida Loca, Just Another Girl on the IRT, Drylongso, which not many people saw--it was made by a Los Angeles filmmaker named Cauleen Smith. You can't name more than five. Oftentimes when I see films about young kids, especially "issue" films, I feel they're kind of insulting. If I were a young person, I'd think they were bullshit. I don't make the films I do just for this reason, but it definitely makes it easier. You've got this totally fertile territory to mine, in terms of the story and the ideas.

For all the talk of how kids define the culture, they seem chronically underrepresented in the art that's made for them. Is that a disjunction you recognize? Does it inform your desire to make films like this?

I don't always know, because some young kids see Our Song and don't connect to it, either. Of course I wanted them to go, "Oh wow, that's me!" and I think a certain amount of kids see it and feel that way, and I think that's enough. But they don't have the language to watch it, oftentimes. It's weird, because it is a movie that I kind of made for young people, and yet at the same time, artistically, it's much more adult. I don't know what the answer to that is. For me, I'm really happy that the movie is out. The idea that it's out in movie theaters at a time like now, when it's very, very difficult for anything to play for more than a week, anywhere, I feel like, "Okay, great. We did good."