In the opening credits of the new Portland-set film Cora Bora, Cora, played by comedian Megan Stalter (Hacks), appears in a series of flashbacks punctuated by Polaroids: partying with her band, making out with her girlfriend Justine (Jonica T. Gibbs), and drinking at Mississippi Studios, the Aladdin, and Alberta Street Pub. The montage is of a simpler, more joyful time in Cora’s life, before she moved to LA. Though set in the present, it could easily send Portland music nerds and indie kids into an early-2000s fever dream.

The movie is a portrait of a complicated mess of a young musician struggling to hold onto a disintegrating long-distance relationship. It captures unfettered (and maybe self-involved) young adulthood, particularly in Portland. There are impromptu, weed-fueled gatherings with strangers at Overlook Park. Everyone seems to know each other, for better or for worse. Nonmonogamy is a non-issue (Cora’s parents are invited to her girlfriend’s girlfriend’s birthday party). But it also unpacks parts of the era that are often glazed over in retellings.

Its resonance is maybe unsurprising, considering the movie’s writer. Before she began working in film, Rhianon Jones—an executive producer behind the dark comedy Shiva Baby—was a Portland musician who played in ’90s and early aughts bands like the Kickstarts and the Del Toros. She looks back on her decade in the city with both sentimentality and regret. “I’m not unlike Cora,” Jones, who now lives in Upstate New York, says. “I made enough mistakes and I burned enough bridges that I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t reinvent myself.” While working on Cora Bora, Jones wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to dig into her Portland past; however, by reflecting on her time in the city’s music scene, and the events that led to her departure, she was able to explore the ways people can outgrow their context, or their context can outgrow them. 

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Brooke Jackson-Glidden: What was your relationship like with Portland when you first lived here?

Rhianon Jones: Like many people, I stayed after college and became really enmeshed with the music scene. I had two worlds: my art friends and my rock ’n’ roll friends. I felt so inspired by the scene, all the art, all these amazing musicians like Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith, but also smaller bands like Dead Moon.

It was such an exciting world to be part of, but it was also a rough world to be part of. I don’t want to give too much [about the movie] away, but there is a pretty oblique reference to the Exploding Hearts [the late 1990s and early 2000s Portland punk band; the majority of the bandmates died in a car crash in 2003]. And in the year and a half around that happening, I knew 10 young people who died for various reasons—car crashes and suicide, cancer and drug overdoses. My nerves were shot. And it was hard, because I felt accepted by that scene. It was so nonjudgmental, like, more than anywhere else I’ve lived in my life. I felt so at home there. But I was like, “I’m gonna die if I stay here.”

BJG: How did you grapple with that while writing the script?

RJ: I didn’t even know if I wanted it to be set in Portland because of all that stuff. But when we got connected with Hannah [Pearl Utt], the director, she was like, “I think we need to see more of her character, because Cora is maybe just a tiny bit of a jerk.” I was like, “What? No, Cora’s great.” But yeah, she’s difficult, and we need to know why. I’m not really anything like Cora; Cora is sort of an amalgamation of my friends, but I was like, “Well, if I have to boil down the most difficult time in my life, when I ran away to LA, it was because [Portland] was starting to feel like a dangerous lifestyle.” So she asked me to go a little bit deeper, and that was what was on my mind when I made the decision to leave Portland. Leaving Portland didn’t fix all my problems. But I didn’t have the room to fix [them] there.

BJG: Is the movie better because you dug into that vulnerability?

RJ: I’ve been getting so much feedback about how emotional it feels. Everyone is like, “I can see so much of you in this.” I guess there was a lot more of me in there than I had realized. To me, it was 20 years ago and I’m in a different place in my life. Cora is younger than I am now, but she’s about the age I was when I left Portland. For older people like me who were in the scene at the time, I don’t know if it will resonate with them, but I hope it does in a good way. If you’re just expecting Meg Stalter being funny like she is on Hacks, it might be shocking. It’s saying something more about the people who are maybe a little more difficult in life, and how maybe there’s a reason for it. She does need to fix herself, but there’s also a reason she still has a loving girlfriend who at least has one foot still in the relationship. Maybe a toe.

BJG: So much of Cora Bora is rooted in the Portland music scene. What was it like to revisit that?

RJ: There’s some wistfulness about how great that scene was. It had its downsides too, but it really was a nourishing environment for people to express themselves. We shouldn’t take that for granted. Not every city is like that, not every scene is like that, not every country is like that. I’m grateful for that time in my life, and I’m glad I slept on floors in weird people’s houses in Billings, Montana. I’m glad I traveled with my bandmates and laughed and shared playlists. The thing about rock ’n’ roll is, if you can get a cheap guitar, anyone can do it—especially with that scene in Portland, that DIY garage rock. Because they were doing it, I knew I could do it. Being a woman, if I had been in a different city where there weren’t as many female musicians, I don’t know if I would have picked up a drumstick or a guitar.

BJG: Were there specific places, venues, that you really wanted to make sure appeared in the movie?

RJ: We talked a lot about that—me and one producer, who has family in Portland, and another who spends a lot of time up there. I was like, “I feel like my references are a little dated.” I was bringing up Dante’s, and they were like, “What about Crystal Ballroom or Holocene?”

BJG: I find it does still feel like Portland, culturally, in the conversations and the interactions between characters. Do you find those interpersonal dynamics to be rooted in a sense of place, or could this story have taken place anywhere?

RJ: The setting definitely influenced me. Even the fact that Cora’s parents are so accepting of her girlfriend’s girlfriend feels a little typical to Portland, in my opinion; I don’t know that that would be the case in every location. The Portland setting really supported the story we were trying to tell. Also, you can’t talk about this movie without talking about the soundtrack.

BJG: Is there a song that really captured what you were going for?

RJ: All the [lyrics] that Cora sings were written by me and Miya [Folick]. I gave her the lyrics and she wrote music to go with what [Cora’s] band sounded like, the Maybe Nots. The song “What’s So Important about Being in Portland?” was written about a guy I dated who [I thought] maybe should move away. I'm the one who ended up leaving.

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from multiple conversations.