It's summer of 1957 rural Louisiana. Dani Trant (Reese Witherspoon) is a 14 year old Elvis fan. She's close to her older sister Maureen who is going to Duke in the fall. She has a younger sister Missy and her mother Abigail (Tess Harper) is pregnant with the fourth. Her father Matthew (Sam Waterston) is eager for a son. While skinny dipping at the Foster's place, Dani encounters 17 year old Court Foster (Jason London) whose family just returned to their property.Reese Witherspoon delivers quite a precocious performance. Her star power is evident even at such a young age. She plays off of Jason London very well who is fully into his boyish charms. The drawback is Emily Warfield who plays Maureen. She doesn't have the same star power and it shows. This coming-of-age story is touching bittersweet like a sunny summer day followed by a stormy night. I love all the conflicted teen girl thought process and first love struggles. It could have gone soft at the end but instead it takes an even darker turn. I do wish that Maureen is played by a more powerful actress. In the end, the sisters' relationship is the center of the movie.

It was the first time I saw Reese Witherspoon's performance.. and bang!!! It was amazing! And I knew It, that she'd be a big star someday.. well now, with an Oscar in her hand... I guess my guts were right.. And about this movie.. LOVE it !!! I even bought the laser disc version of it (dvds weren't there yet). Later that i knew, that this movie was the first movie of Reese Witherspoon too. Not many actors would give such a golden performance in their first time.So I got nothing more to say except that the story, the actors' performances and the soundtracks, they're all g.r.e.a.t !Let's sing.. "I would spend my whole life through, loving you, just loving you....."

For its first 80 minutes, "The Man in the Moon" plays as a handsome, simply woven tale of family life in rural Louisiana, seen primarily through the eyes of two sisters. For its last 25 minutes, it plays out a pointless consequence of manufactured conflict that takes a potentially great film and disappointingly dispatches it as little more than one-off melodrama and an unsatisfying resolution.Along with Tess Harper as matriarch Abigail, Sam Waterston shows his under-appreciated versatility as Matthew Trant, the stern, hard-working father of Dani, played with extraordinary aplomb by then-newcomer Reese Witherspoon, and her older sister Maureen, played by Emily Warfield. Maureen is looking toward college, while Dani tries hard to convince the world she isn't still a kid at the ripe age of 14. The conflict ensues when the recently widowed friend of Trant's moves into the adjacent farm along with her 17-year-old son, Cort, who catches Dani's eye as her first youthful love. On the one hand, "Moon" draws a nicely articulated tale of 50's era family life, yet interrupts the tale with manufactured interruptions of tragic shadow that seem only to serve the purpose of...interrupting the tale and force the drama, as if the writers don't truly trust the material they've developed. Individually, the performances are authentic and on the mark, even if the story often isn't. Despite the story flaws, "Man in the Moon" is a good work. It's just so frustrating to realize that a truly great work was but a stone's throw away.

The movie itself is really good! The story contains a lot of interesting topics that maybe should have been developed in a different way (as the love of younger girl for an older boy). The final scene is what (in my opinion) ruined the whole movie, and that's why i haven't give it a 10 or a 9. The fact that Court creates a fight between the sisters should be the beginning of a big part of the story, not an episode that is developed in the last 20 minutes or something, that concludes itself with the death of the young man and the resolution in 5 minutes of the sisters' fight. Maybe to not introduce this final part or to put it in advance was going to be the best choice.