Marion McPherson (played brilliantly by Laurie Metcalf, who deserves all the Best Supporting Actress awards we can throw at her in 2018) is a warm, loving, hardworking mental health nurse who is also thoroughly pissed off at her teenage daughter’s lack of gratitude and respect. Her husband Larry (Tracy Letts) is depressed and jobless but extremely nice, which means that Marion always has to be the ‘bad guy’ when it comes to dealing with their kids.

In other words, she’s a fully-formed, believable 50-something female character, something that’s rarer than unicorns in mainstream cinema.

Lady Bird’s journey from resenting to appreciating Marion is, indisputably, the most important story arc in the entire film (Gerwig initially titled her script Mothers and Daughters). Again, this is something we see often in real life, but almost never in movies: the way the relationship between mothers and daughters can be as complex and character-defining, if not much more so, than any romantic heartbreak.

Importantly, the film doesn’t offer any neat solutions to Marion and Lady Bird’s fraught relationship. They love each other deeply, and they drive each other mad, and that’s just the way it is.

In a recent interview, Gerwig described Lady Bird as “a movie about wanting to leave a place that’s secretly a love letter to the place, and a movie ostensibly about a daughter that’s secretly about the mother”. It’s all that, and much more. You owe it to yourself to see it.

Lady Bird is due to be released in the UK on February 16, 2018.

Lady Bird, the best-reviewed film of all time, more than lives up to the hype