MOVIE REVIEW: 'Eighth Grade' gives us a 13-year-old heroine who is beaten but unbowed

Since the dawn of time -- or, really, the Dawn of the John Hughes Paleozoic -- American movies involving teens have followed simple, contrasting dichotomies to represent their characters' perspectives.

You were popular, or desperate to be so, in love and romantically successful, or completely out there maddeningly alone.

Kids were subdivided into rigid class strata (you were a "brain," a "dweeb," or a "Richie," or could earn a dubious title, and parents were mysterious, clumsily awkward creatures and objects of intense ridicule, whose best instincts were buried behind day-to-day work grinds, or navigating the fathomless waters of divorce or long-term marriages.

Nothing wrong there, per se, but the resultant cartoonish portrayal of the middle-class teen catered to the audience by dumbing down their characters, letting the beleaguered protagonists, struggling like hell to change their miserable trajectories, ride out the idiocy around them by staying true to themselves and earning everyone's respect in the process.

Bo Burnham's stunning directorial debut plays along similar lines, but eschews the usual teen platitudes and self-congratulations, and the moral condemnation, by utilizing characters whose emotional lives are a good deal more complex and labyrinthine than the genre typically embraces. The result is a film that feels as if it gets things just about right, even as it utilizes more standard structural underpinnings: Capturing modern young teenagers and revealing them in their natural habitat, like one of those rigged-up National Geographic cameras that shows through a tripped flash the comings and goings of a secretive, nocturnal species.

Despite that analogy, in their own way, the modern teen is, after all, big into curating and cultivating his or her own social media image. We first meet Kayla (Elsie Fisher) as she records another one of her heartbreakingly underviewed self-help videos, where she tries to sound confident and wizened, the kind of teen guru dispensing knowingly sage advice on topics such as "being yourself," "putting yourself out there," and "being confident," she herself watches. She is somewhat nervous and shaky in front of the cam, despite herself, stammering a stream of 'likes' and 'y'know's' and looking a lot more like the quiet, anxious kid she actually is than the confidently implacable role model she's trying to portray, closing each segment with an supremely awkward attempt at a catchphrase.

But, here's the thing: Despite her awkward delivery, Kayla's actual philosophy is pretty spot on, and, more amazingly, in the course of the film, she actually follows her own edicts, generally to positive effect. She's no wallflower, or set-upon loser for whom cheap comedy is piled on top of her endless humiliations, but that's not to say Burnham doesn't have her suffer.

In one beautifully embarrassing moment, Kayla arrives at the pool party of gorgeous, popular Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), a vain, cold-hearted girl who only invited Kayla at her mother's insistence ("Mom said I have to invite you, so this is me doing that" she texts Kayla). Standing in the house in her one-piece, Kayla stares out the sliding glass doors a minute to reflect on the social hell she's about to be enveloped by -- a scene that Burnham captures perfectly by first putting the camera outside the glass doors, and then slowly pulling back from Kayla, intercutting with small vignettes of what the cool kids are doing -- dancing, blasting each other with hoses, downing Gatorades, and bags of Doritos while floating in the pool -- in order to more perfectly isolate her against her peer group.

Kayla maintains in one of her vlog segments that she is, in fact, not the least bit shy, but rather, doesn't want to talk to the kids in her school, turning it into a choice, rather than a curse. The truth is closer to the middle ground there: She is a bit shy, but not in the way so many teenage protagonists are, helpless to their affliction, and powerless in their own agency. In a different entry, she takes the example of the humiliating party she attended, but turns it on its head, casting herself as the host, having to invite a "weird" girl to the party by her (notably non-existent) mom; only, in this version, the "weird" girl turns out to be really cool, and becomes the hit of the party.

Instead of being shy and defenseless, Kayla is the kind of young woman who writes power notes and exhortations to herself ("practice small talk," "smile wide") and, by God, actually attempts to fulfill them in the course of her day. Not content to stick to her lot, she yearns to stretch her fledgling wings, and is more than willing to take some serious chances in order to do so. In one wincing scene at school, she "casually" indicates to Aiden (Luke Prael), the boy she has an enormous crush on, that she stores an entire cache of "dirty" photos of herself, just waiting for the right boyfriend to bestow them to (a gambit that seems initially to have the desired effect: Aiden, a blank-faced cypher, finally opens his eyes and actually looks at her upon hearing this news, "Really?" he asks, momentarily interested).

As Kayla suffers the slings and arrows of the social-media minded teenager, her poor father, well-meaning but largely marginalized Mark (Josh Hamilton), does everything he can to stay connected to his daughter, while having to allow that she is busy disavowing him at every turn. Mark is a single dad -- the only thing we ever hear about Kayla's mom is that she left early on after Kayla was born -- and works hard to maintain his good cheer, even as she's constantly chastising him ("Don't look sad and weird," she commands as he drives her to the shopping mall).

He spends the vast majority of the film desperately trying and failing to say and do the right thing, so in the film's climactic scene -- where Kayla asks him to help her burn a box of mementos she refers to later as her "hopes and dreams" in the backyard -- when Mark actually does manage to say the thing Kayla desperately needs to hear at that exact moment, it results in a heart-felt hug that feels utterly earned.

Burnham, a renown YouTube comedian, has made this film with uncanny deftness -- capturing the horrible, half-metamorphosed state of the 13-year-old, not even fully arrived into teenhood, but suddenly light years away from a vastly more comfortable childhood. Kayla is a fantastically rendered character, but so is Mark, and her friend Gabe (Jake Ryan), Kennedy's goofy cousin, whom she meets at the party and eventually befriends, and many others.

Burnham gives the impression he could spin these kinds of stories about every character we meet -- and you could certainly imagine the pull of revisiting Kayla the last week of her senior year of high school, Linklater-style. While it would be fascinating to see her continued evolution, but in truth, it's not necessary. She gets through middle school beaten but unbowed. We can only imagine where she goes from here, but, as her father tells her, whatever direction she chooses, we don't need to worry about her anymore, somehow or other, she's going to be OK.

MovieStyle on 08/03/2018