Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The short virtual reality film BattleScar starts before you even put on the headset. In Sundance’s experimental New Frontier section, viewers enter a booth that’s been transformed into a teen girl’s bedroom, circa 1978. A mattress sits on the floor, littered with a leather jacket and high boots. One wall has PUNK slashed in straight black lines. Beneath that, in smaller script: was invented by girls. The design is clearly conveying defiance, but with 40 years of hindsight, the aesthetic is comfortingly familiar.

BattleScar is the start of a three-part series created by illustrators Nico Casavecchia and Martin Allais. It’s also one of the most ambitious narrative VR pieces at the show, attempting to capture the spirit of the past in a futuristic medium. But like a lot of VR, it’s just big enough to leave you wishing for more.

What’s the genre?

Upbeat animated ‘70s coming-of-age story, made for virtual reality.

What’s it about?

A 16-year-old Puerto Rican-American girl named Lupe (voiced by Rosario Dawson) is arrested for vagrancy in New York. Her cellmate is a fellow runaway named Debbie, whose ripped jeans and profane monologues mark her as part of the city’s nascent punk scene. When the two of them are released, Debbie senses that Lupe is a kindred spirit and asks if she can write songs — and Lupe, desperate for a place to stay, pretends she can. Debbie quickly catches the lie, but is impressed by Lupe’s diary, which is full of gritty free-verse poetry. The pair team up, but any future adventures will have to wait for the next episodes.

What’s it really about?

BattleScar is a nostalgic homage to an era that its creators — both born in the late ‘70s — were just young enough to miss. The idea came from Casavecchia’s partner Mercedes Arturo, who was inspired while reading a book by punk poet Patti Smith. “We were living in New York at the time, and I was telling him, ‘I don’t want this book to finish, because I don’t want this world to finish,’” she puts it. “You always miss the time you didn’t live in, in a way, right?”

In BattleScar, people are still playing shows at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, teenagers are still starting bands based on DIY zines, and New York is dirty but alive. The creators go out of their way to highlight the role of women in punk, featuring two female characters who don’t think twice about forming a band. (I came away with a cassette mixtape of songs from female punk musicians, including Smith.) The character of Lupe also apparently provided a connection between the creators and old New York. “We are immigrants, and we’ve lived abroad in countries all our lives. So I think that angle to us was a way to bring home something that felt distant,” Casavecchia says.

That’s all sort of abstract, though, in a piece so brief. So far, BattleScar simply constructs a place with limitless potential, and shows it to us through the eyes of a teenager.

Is it good?

Well, it’s short, and there’s only so much you can do to establish a setting or develop a relationship in nine minutes. But it uses its running time economically, and the piece is edited elegantly, shifting between full-sized sets and tiny vignettes floating in mid-air. It takes advantage of virtual reality’s strengths, but still focuses on telling a story that’s compelling in its own right. Its character art veers a little too hard toward the cartoonish, but its stylization looks good in a headset’s relatively low resolution. BattleScar has a polish and confidence that would have been hard to find in VR a year or two ago.

For better or worse, BattleScar is also open about offering an idealized and inspirational sketch of the past — not trying to actually reconstruct the 1970s in virtual reality. There’s an earnest, escapist quality to the characters’ disillusionment with society, and their willingness to throw their old lives away to participate in a new movement (although it’s possible that later episodes will complicate this optimism). I can’t say whether BattleScar captures the feeling of coming of age in the Bowery punk movement. But it perfectly captures a rebellious fantasy that generations of teens have had since then.

How interactive is it?

You can’t touch or affect anything in the experience, but it takes place in 3D rendered environments, rather than being a live-action spherical video. If you’re in a headset with external tracking, this means you can move around objects or lean close to characters.

How can I actually watch it?

BattleScar is supposed to be making the festival circuit for a while, and the creators say they have a deal with YouTube to stream it online at some point. The series’ two other episodes are supposed to be finished by the end of the year — no word on how you’ll be able to watch them, though.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/22/16912814/battlescar-vr-new-york-punk-rosario-dawson-sundance-2018