General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is a 1995 American independent romantic comedy written and directed by Maria Maggenti, in which two high school seniors from opposite social backgrounds, the working-class tomboy Randy Dean and the affluent Evie Roy, fall in love. It stars Laurel Holloman and Nicole Ari Parker, was produced by Dolly Hall through Smash Pictures, and was distributed by Fine Line Features.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995; Los Angeles and New York theatrical openings on June 16, 1995 through Fine Line Features²^•¹
Cast	Laurel Holloman as Randy Dean; Nicole Ari Parker as Evie Roy; Maggie Moore, Kate Stafford, Sabrina Artel, and Dale Dickey in supporting roles¹^•³
Runtime and rating	94 to 95 minutes; rated R by the MPAA⁴^•¹
Budget and box office	Production budget $250,000; opening weekend $60,104 in 9 theaters; gross USA about $2.0 million⁵^•⁴
Reception	77% Tomatometer from 22 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes⁴
Award	GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film (Independent), 1996⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman) is a high school senior with poor grades and a cashier's job at a gas station. She lives with her aunt Rebecca, Rebecca's girlfriend Vicky, and Rebecca's ex-lover Lena in a household Randy describes as a "normal, typical, regular lesbo household," and pursues a desultory affair with Wendy, a married woman who visits the gas station.⁷^•⁸

Evie Roy (Nicole Ari Parker) is a wealthy, popular classmate who lives with her mother, prefers Mozart and Walt Whitman, and is growing tired of her boyfriend. The two meet when Evie brings her Range Rover into the repair shop where Randy works after school. Their friendship turns romantic, and the relationship costs each of them something: Evie loses her friends, Randy lies to her family, and the couple eventually flees to a seedy motel, where family and friends converge to stop them from eloping.⁹^•¹⁰^•¹¹

Production

Origins. Maria Maggenti, then doing AIDS activist work with ACT-UP and making political film and video pieces, had promised in a letter soliciting support for her enrollment at NYU Film School to create realistic stories of gay and lesbian life missing from mainstream screens. The screenplay was developed in a screenwriting class at NYU and drew loosely on her own experience of falling in love as a teenager; she said she went back to notes she had written in high school and called her high school friends.¹²^•²

The eight-day script. After a friend persuaded her to pitch the story to independent producers, interest arrived within days while only a partial script existed. Maggenti pitched the story on the spot, claimed she had written it, and then completed the screenplay in eight days with a colleague locking her in her apartment to write.¹³^•²

Financing and shoot. Maggenti, a lesbian, filmed the story with a $35,000 loan from a patron in New York, an older businessman who had seen one of her short films. She and producer Dolly Hall shot a no-budget 16mm feature the summer before Maggenti finished at NYU, sold domestic rights during post-production to Fine Line Features, and sold foreign rights to Miramax after the Sundance premiere.¹⁴^•¹³^•¹²

The crew included cinematographer Tami Reiker, editor Susan Graef, production designer Ginger Tougas, and composer Terry Dame.¹

Release and reception

The film premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival to acclaim and opened in Los Angeles and New York on June 16, 1995.²^•¹ It opened on 9 screens, grossing $60,104 in its first weekend and about $2.0 million in the United States against a $250,000 production budget.⁵^•⁴ The MPAA rated it R for a strong sex scene involving teen girls, language, and some drug use.⁵

Critics responded to its conventional storytelling. Time Out wrote that although the story was not hugely original, the film had charm thanks to the easy naturalism of the performances, and called it a conventional telling of a modern fairy story whose subversive content should offend virtually no one.¹⁰ The New York Times hailed it as "a universal story about first love, adolescent rebellion and sexual awakening."⁹ In 1996 it won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film (Independent).⁶

Place in queer cinema

The film is now celebrated as an iconic part of the 1990s queer cinema canon, and scholars of New Queer Cinema list it alongside Go Fish and The Watermelon Woman as typical lesbian films of that movement.⁹^•¹⁵ A 2007 dissertation on queer coming-of-age film describes it as the first film in its group to negotiate the coming out of American youth as a central narrative thrust.¹⁶

Its tone set it apart within that canon. Strand Releasing notes that audiences often referred to it, with relief, as one of the few lesbian movies with a "happy ending where no one dies."⁹ Maggenti herself said she felt she might be letting down the legacy of queer cinema by writing a beginning-middle-end story that never breaks the fourth wall, but concluded that what matters is the individual voice.¹² A 2004 article in the Journal of Lesbian Studies used the film's household of Randy, her aunt, and her aunt's girlfriend, threatened by the arrival of the aunt's ex-lover, to examine the role of the ex-lover in contemporary lesbian families.⁸

The film marked its 30th anniversary on June 16, 2025, and has been preserved in a 35mm print held by the Sundance Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive; a digital restoration has also been released.³^•¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026