warning: moderate spoilers

Lili Taylor plays the title role in Julie Johnson, a movie about having the courage to take charge of your life and realize your dreams that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001. The film is now available on satellite television nationwide and on cable in most large cities on gay and lesbian TV network here!

Julie is a working class New Jersey housewife with two kids and a husband who’s a cop. She voraciously reads her secret stash of popular science magazines and watches every nature program she can while her husband is at work and her kids are at school. One day she realizes she’s “tired of being stupid” and decides to make something more of her life.

After finding a brochure for night school in the mail, Julie decides to take a computer class at an adult school. Her domineering husband has no respect for his wife’s abilities and makes fun of her desire to get her GED and apply to college. She has finally had it, so she decides to make a go of it without him. She throws him out and goes about finding a job to support herself and her two kids.

Julie’s best friend Claire (played by Courtney Love) is also married to a police officer, and she follows suit when she suddenly up and leaves him. She moves in with Julie and it’s a round-the-clock slumber party—that is, until Julie confesses she’s in love with Claire. The remainder of the film deals with how this revelation affects their relationship.

The screenplay was co-written by Wendy Hammond and director bob Gosse. In addition to Taylor and Love, the cast includes Mischa Barton as Julie's daughter, Noah Emmerich as her husband, and the late Spalding Gray as Julie’s supportive night school teacher. Hammond has said that the original idea came from volunteer work she did in a home for battered women. She was impressed by their persevering desire to grow, and the movie was inspired by the incredible courage and strength these women exhibited.

There are many facets of the Julie Johnson story that are implausible. Her staggering abilities are honed without formal training, surfacing overnight. She reads a few articles she can’t even understand and the next thing you know she’s “writing an encryption algorithm” that immediately fixes the malfunctioning computer in the school lab. She gets the teacher’s jokes that stump the feebler-minded Claire and soon he’s telling her she could get a full scholarship to MIT.

Her husband is conveniently a jerk, which apparently justifies Julie kicking him out and never looking back. Claire’s husband seems guilty of little more than negligence, but he too is summarily dumped, setting the stage for the pair to shack up and hook up.

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