An American Crime

“The true story of a child's punishment that became a woman's crime.”

In the 1960s, a teenage girl named Sylvia Likens (Elliot Page) ends up in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski (Catherine Keener), a single mother running a crowded household in suburban Indiana. Her new guardian keeps her locked in the basement, and the film is built on that true case. Tommy O'Haver tells it partly through a courtroom, with Bradley Whitford as the prosecutor, and the story is cut between the trial and the house.