SO, Anna Friel really is more than a pretty face with that soap opera lesbian kiss past. Me Without You, like this week's other new girl movie in York, Riding In Cars With Boys, is a rites-of-passage comic drama that requires a star name to age backwards and forwards between her teens and thirties. Throughout, Friel is the stuff of fantasy dressing-up calendars.

Sandra Goldbacher's bittersweet, emotional roller-coaster casts Friel and Michelle Williams (a young American but you can't tell) as Marina and Holly, best friends growing up next door to each other in the stereotypical quiet London suburb.

At ten, the girls make a pact to be life-long friends. Marina is the superficially assured yet vulnerable one, naughty, stroppy, self-serving and extrovert, rebelling against her unstable home life. Holly is the awkward, sensitive, brighter, book-reading one from the sensible family, who is accustomed to being in Marina's shadow as they progress through punk, first sex, first drugs and a series of bad hair years and fashion follies.

They go to the same college in Brighton, share a freezing hovel and, unknown to each other, end up bedding the same American tutor (an ultra-smooth Kyle MacLachlan).

Holly's open-hearted path to womanhood blossoms as Marina's more selfish route begins to blur, and there is the added complication of Holly's on-off relationship with Marina's woolly brother Nat, as the claustrophobic bond becomes a love-hate relationship.

Goldbacher's study of loyalties being tested amid betrayal, guilt and crushing love is blessed with winning performances from both Friel, who responds to her role with a new maturity, and the more naturally gifted Williams. The script, sweet and sour, knowing and poignant, is a joy; the period detail painfully accurate; the soundtrack the best of the year. It's the Friel thing.