Based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women,” this film is directed by Greta Gerwig.

Gerwig skillfully navigates the line between respecting the story’s old-fashioned bones while showing the modernity of its proto-feminist perspective.

Gerwig’s screenplay begins with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) already living independently in a New York boarding house, sending money home to her family from tutoring jobs. The turning point that will shape her future comes when she sells her first story to Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts), editor of the Weekly Volcano, though despite the giveaway of her ink-stained fingers, Jo insists she’s submitting the work “for a friend” and asks that it be published anonymously. She accepts Dashwood’s “alterations,” and agrees to convey the advice that if her friend intends to write more stories with a female protagonist, to make sure she’s married by the end. “Or dead. Either way.”

Jo’s vain youngest sister Amy (Florence Pugh) is likewise introduced well into her development, studying painting in Paris while serving as companion to their wealthy Aunt March (Meryl Streep). Amy is being courted by a well-heeled Brit, but a chance encounter with family friend Theodore Laurence (Timothee Chalamet), known as “Laurie,” suggests her childhood crush on him hasn’t gone away, despite her show of sympathy over Jo’s rejection of his marriage proposal.

Eldest sister Meg (Emma Watson) is a young woman already married and living in a cottage on modest means with her schoolteacher husband John Brooke (James Norton), Laurie’s former tutor. There is little mention of the fourth sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen), aside from a brief glimpse of her playing the piano, in the early parts of the film.

Before jumping back seven years to their adolescence in Concord, Gerwig plants the seeds of romance between Jo and her boarding house acquaintance Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel), a language professor from France. But that blossoming mutual attraction gets interrupted when he criticizes one of her stories of duels and adventures, telling her to write about something she knows.

Back in the all-female March household, the girls’ mother Marmee (Laura Dern) is presiding over her brood with forbearance and love while their father (Bob Odenkirk) is away serving as a chaplain in the Civil War.

The dual-track chronology makes it clear that Jo’s memories of her upbringing fuel the discovery of her true voice as a novelist.(SD-Agencies)