Recipient of a Grand Jury Prize at 2018’s Sundance Film Festival, Desiree Akhavan’s exquisite follow-up to Appropriate Behavior (Frameline38) brings us back to the early 1990s, as we explore the life of teenage orphan Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kick-Ass). When her “boyfriend” busts Cameron making out with the prom queen after a school formal, her guardians send her to God’s Promise, a Christian “gay conversion” camp, to cure her of her SSA (same-sex attraction). As Cameron acclimates to her new surroundings, she’s drawn to the two misfits of the group: a girl named Jane Fonda (the luminous Sasha Lane of American Honey), who hides marijuana in her wooden leg, and Adam (Forrest Goodluck, The Revenant), a two-spirit Native American whose father sent him away after converting to Christianity.

While it certainly sounds like a dramatic version of But I’m a Cheerleader (Frameline24), Akhavan uses deft humor — and rousing karaoke numbers to 4 Non Blondes and Céline Dion — alongside the gravity of her subject in adapting Emily M. Danforth’s 2012 novel of the same name. With a uniformly magnificent cast, which also includes Tony Award nominee Emily Skeggs (Fun Home) and Jennifer Ehle (Wilde) as the ice queen director of God’s Promise (whom one character describes as “your own personal Disney villain”), The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a profound and timely meditation on how far we’ve come—and how far we still need to go.