In ‘My Brilliant Career,’ I saw an uncanny mirror image. And a cautionary tale.

The movies I grew up on were entertaining, escapist, sometime edifying. But I didn’t see myself in any of them. “My Brilliant Career” changed that. For the first time, I experienced that powerful transference that occurs when the life on screen seems to be mirroring your own, not just its external trappings but its most intimate, even shameful, interior.

As the film opens, Sybylla Melvyn is writing from the ramshackle farm she has grown up on in the Australian bush, obliviously scrawling her memoirs as a dust storm rages outside. It’s 1897, and her family wants their eldest daughter either to marry well or get a suitable job to help support them. Sybylla, played by Judy Davis, chafes against those options, confessing to her little sister, “I want to do great things.”

What she means by “things” is unclear, but it has something to do with meeting “people who talk about books and words and have visions.” Later, after she re-connects with a childhood friend — played by dreamy Sam Neill in one of cinema’s most classic meet-cutes — she’s offered a suitable marriage everyone expects her to jump at with gratitude and relief. But she declines. “I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life,” she tells him, “when I haven’t lived my own yet.”

“My Brilliant Career” is best known as the feature debut of Gillian Armstrong, who adapted Miles Franklin’s novel with note-perfect compositional detail and effortlessly graceful pacing. Most importantly, she cast Davis as Sybylla, marking a breakout moment for the actress, who played her character with just the right mix of headstrong confidence and nagging insecurity. Along with Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” Bruce Beresford’s “Breaker Morant” and Fred Schepisi’s “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “My Brilliant Career” was considered part of a New Wave of Australian filmmaking that engulfed American art houses in the 1970s and 1980s.

All of that cinematic history was lost on me as I watched Davis deliver a breakthrough performance that astonished me for its uncanny proximity to my own hopes, fears, outlandish ambitions and self-sabotaging hauteurs. We both played the piano — Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” — and we both had fractious relationships with our mothers. With her ungovernable mass of red hair and equally prodigious smattering of freckles, her face seemingly devoid of makeup, Sybylla even looked like me, sort of.

I might not have lived on a farm, but growing up in Iowa, I nursed similar aspirations to escape, become a writer and live a life of excitement, cultural sophistication and creative inspiration. Like Sybylla, I was blessed with an abundance of intellectual confidence. But that bravado bumped up against a chronic lack of “feminine vanity” when it came to the opposite sex, masking a deep-seated certainty that I was undesirable and, by extension, unlovable. As Sybylla complains in the film: “It’s bad enough being born a girl — but ugly and clever . . . ” She didn’t have to finish that sentence. I knew exactly how it ended.

At the end of “My Brilliant Career,” Sybylla mails off her manuscript to a publisher, facing a new dawn with characteristic optimism. A few years later, I took a similarly bold chance, moving to New York to pursue that vague future I had visualized back in Des Moines. Sybylla’s pronouncement wasn’t literally ringing in my ears, but it was whispering: “I’m not marrying anyone. I’m going to have a career. Literature, music, art. . . . I’ve not made up my mind yet.”

I got an entry-level job at a magazine, began writing short articles and eventually went freelance — one of my first assignments being an interview with Sam Neill (eight years after I’d first seen him on screen, now in his early 40s, he was still dreamy). Like lots of women my age, I was having a blast making new friends, dating and savoring Manhattan’s art, culture and nightlife. I really did meet people who talked about books and words and had visions.

But, when it came to romance, that all-important lasting connection was proving elusive. It turned out that Sybylla’s wasn’t the only voice I had internalized. As her family friend Aunt Gussie says at one point, “Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence.”

It turned out that Gussie, not Sybylla, would be the unofficial mascot for 1980s, when the media became obsessed with myths about ticking biological clocks, work-life balance and having it all. In 1986, Newsweek published an article suggesting — falsely — that single women over 40 were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. The narrow Victorian standards of acceptability and autonomy that Sybylla rejected in “My Brilliant Career” would prove dispiritingly resilient in countless portraits of women grappling with their desire for professional achievement and personal happiness. From “Broadcast News” to “Sex and the City,” from “Working Girl” to “Insecure,” the driving question is whether a woman can find and express her authentic sense of self without paying the “terrible price” of a solitary life. (Meanwhile, we have yet to see the definitive movie about a man worrying about juggling work and fatherhood — indeed, we have yet to see any movie about such a unicorn.)

Watching “My Brilliant Career” today, I am still amazed at how closely Sybylla’s fictional persona tacked to my own young self, and I can see that, for all our confidence and determination, we were also off-puttingly arrogant and self-absorbed. Now in the throes of caring for elderly loved ones back home in Iowa, I wish I hadn’t been so hellbent on leaving in the first place. Even through a different lens, though, watching someone finding her artistic voice never fails to evoke a frisson of recognition and vicarious triumph. As a critic, I know firsthand what it means to see yourself reflected on screen, and the psychic damage that’s inflicted when you don’t.

In the decades since I first saw “My Brilliant Career,” I did what most people do: I put my head down and kept doing my job, following a circuitous, largely improvisatory path that led to becoming a film critic (not in the plan), marrying at 40 (ditto) and adopting a toddler at 44 (double ditto). It turns out that it is possible to have it all, just not always at the same time or on purpose, maybe not for long, and certainly not without sacrifice. That’s what it means to have a career — one that may not be brilliant, and has been far from perfect, but is all mine.