The Crown Not Heavy

Alissa, an 18-year-old Jewish Muscovite from a good home wants two things more than anything else: to be a music journalist and to once and for all lose her virginity and become a woman. She drops out of university to her parents’ chagrin, acquires an extravagant wardrobe and a wild hairstyle, harbors great aspirations and displays a captivating innocence.

In the penumbra of the looming break-up of the Soviet Union, Alissa gets involved with the Moscow’s fringe art and punk scene, rubbing shoulders with the members of anarchist and other anti-establishment circles. Her guide and mentor is the macho Gromov, 30-year-old editor of an underground rock magazine, artist, poet and musician who lives with his father. Gromov cultivates his mane of straw-blond hair, his avant-garde fervor and his male chauvinism. Alissa falls in love with him, and is determined, together with him, to battle unto the death against the purveyors of Soviet culture. But really, she is looking for adventures, and finds them in abundance.

While blazing her path through cacophony, chaos and craziness, Alissa faces the perils of becoming an adult: falling hopelessly in love without any chance of success, being dependent on her parents, needing to make a living, facing government censorship, coping with the oppressive lack of ‘a room of her own’—obstacles that stand in the way of her goals of achieving personal liberty, discovering sexual pleasure and of the joyous celebration of life.