It’s rare to find a show that treats modern adolescents with as much care and grace as HBO’s We Are Who We Are. And it’s equally as rare to find a cast of young actors as talented and emotionally connected to their characters as we have in the series. From the minds of Paolo Giordano, Francesca Manieri, and Luca Guadagnino (director of Call Me By Your Name, who also directed each of the ten installments of the series), We Are Who We Are manages to dig into crucial issues like family, sexuality, identity, friendship, and love while never losing sight of how young and malleable its core cast of characters are – and never making the adults that surround them (who have their own layers of interpersonal drama outside of their relationships with the kids in their lives) into the bad guys. It’s a tough needle to thread, and the series effectively manages to thread it time and again across the series.
Set on an American military base in Italy, the series follows two 14-year-old teens, Fraser Wilson (a frayed and complex Jack Dylan Grazer, who you likely remember from the It films) and Caitlin “Harper” Poythress (newcomer Jordan Kristine Seamón, who gives such a deep performance in a challenging role that I cannot wait to see what she appears in next), as they buck against the rigidity of their base lives and attempt to make sense of who they are and who they want to be – all while receiving pressure from around them to conform to what others want them to be. While going through their own personal explorations of identity, Fraser and Caitlin must also contend with changing friendships, debilitating personal losses, and family friction – it would be hell of a lot for an adult to handle, much less two teenagers.
I’ve spoken in the past about how the perfect marriage of character and actor can make for a truly special performance – which is the case here with both Grazer and Seamón), but when you take that and couple it with a visionary director like Guadagnino – a man who understands how a location can become another crucial character in a story – you end up with We Are Who We Are. The theatrical flourishes in Guadagnino’s directorial style elevate the story by bringing the audience’s focus on the minutiae – things that might go wholly unnoticed in a shot, but elements that are essentially to tying the image on our screen together with the story unfolding. And then there are the moments of pure joy, sprinkled among the more complicated plot points. It’s in those moments that we are reminded that our protagonists are kids – kids who engage in paint fights as a release, kids who aren’t nearly old enough to understand the ramifications of bringing sex into romantic relationships, kids who look to drugs and alcohol to self medicate because they can’t find the words to express their emotional scars and they think the adults in their world are too wrapped up in their own issues to notice (and, unfortunately for the characters in the series, they aren’t wrong about that point).
And then there are the adults, led by Chloë Sevigny and Alice Braga as Fraser’s mothers, both of whom have very different, yet still strained, relationships with him. Many of Fraser’s disappointments are blamed on them, some rightfully, some in a way only a 14-year-old can find fault with those in authority above him. As for Caitlin, well, she has a father who sees a clear path for his beloved daughter (which, naturally, isn’t the same one she is starting to see for herself) played unevenly by Scott Mescudi, and a mother who can sense that she’s losing control of both of her children as they fight to pull away from her control and discover their own paths, played heartbreakingly by Faith Alabi. It’s through Braga and Alabi’s performances that we get our sense of how difficult it can be to find oneself sandwiched between the wants of a driven spouse and the needs of lost children. I often found myself wanting to spend more time with each of them, although the series was careful not to let us too deep into their psyches.
If you are looking for an original fever dream of a series that takes its time to build up its young character while refusing to discount its adults, We Are Who We Are is for you. It’s whip smart, achingly compassionate, and an all-around gorgeous series. And while Guadagnino has said he might be willing to revisit the characters at some point down the road, the series was created as a complete, limited series when it was written and shot, so the whole story is there for you to partake of.
We Are Who We Are recently finished its run on HBO. You can watch all ten episodes on HBO Max and HBO.
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