Keira Knightley on Laggies, relationships, and surviving your 20s

Lynn Shelton's Laggies, a warm dramedy about a woman (Keira Knightley) sorting out her late-20s malaise as she tries to find her true path in life, comes out today. And if you think you can relate to the film's premise, you're definitely not alone. "What was really quite interesting was that every woman I know has been through something like this. Every single person I know," Knightley said in a telephone interview with The Week. "And the fact that this story hadn't been told from a female perspective — as far as I can remember — was quite interesting and strange."

Knightley plays Megan, the aimless, unassuming American woman at the heart of Laggies — and she's well aware that the role is light-years away from what audiences generally expect from her. "I'm not normally offered things like this," Knightley said. "I'm definitely known for more period English characters, and this was something I hadn't done before. I got to the point, at the end of Anna Karenina, where I realized that the previous five years' work had been very dark. And I wanted to find things that were more optimistic and hopeful."

But Knightley's extensive history in period costume dramas has given her plenty of time to think about the ways in which cultural attitudes about youth have evolved. "Culturally, we separate youth," she said. "If you go back to the 19th century, or the earlier 20th century, it was very much about being a man and a woman. Being manly, and being a grown-up. That was the thing that was idealized. We're at the reverse of that now: the teenage idol. […] We want to stay younger for longer."

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Megan begins Laggies reasonably content with her life: twirling a sign on the side of the road during the day, eating pizza with her parents at night, and indulging in a cozy, low-stakes relationship with Anthony (Mark Webber), her long-term boyfriend. But her quarter-life crisis reaches an apex when Anthony proposes marriage. Her friends, who have long moved on to marriages and careers of their own, don't understand why she's not interested in the same things.

But Knightley doesn't see Megan's aimlessness as a negative quality — or even an unusual one. "I think everybody has been through a point in their lives where they question what they're doing, or where they're going, or who they're with, or what they should be doing, or where they should be going."

The gulf between Megan and her regular group of friends leads her to an unlikely relationship with the 16-year-old Annika (Chloe Grace-Moretz). Over the course of the film, she serves as a kind of hybrid friend/mentor/surrogate mother to the high-schooler. "I think particularly girls, at that age — they need somebody older," said Knightley. "I'm not one to say 'look up to,' but older friends are quite important for a girl at that age, who aren't related to them. Someone they can talk to about things that they couldn't talk with their mom, or an aunt. I know that I had one, who was much older than me, at that age, and I certainly still adore her and see her. It's nice to be able to talk to somebody."

As she connects with both Annika and her father (Sam Rockwell), Megan finds what she's been missing, which Knightley sums up in a single word: "Laughter."

In the end, Laggies is refreshingly non-judgmental about its title character, and the decisions she ultimately makes about the life she wants. "You can absolutely know what you want to do, and know the direction you want to go in," said Knightley. "But you're always going to come up against something someday: 'Is this right? Maybe this is wrong. Maybe everything is wrong,'" said Knightley. "I think that's sort of the joy and the difficulty of being a human being. These are the questions that we're made of."

This interview has been condensed and edited from a longer conversation.