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Bo Burnham’s debut feature announces him as a fresh and talented auteur (he’s only 28 and comes from a comedy, YouTube background). It’s a mercilessly spot-on depiction of the trials and tribulations of being a female thirteen year-old in modern America, avoiding many high-school movie tropes and clichés along the way. It’s also sensationally acted by young Elsie Fisher as shy eighth-grader Kayla and super-indie stalwart Josh Hamilton as her kind single dad.
The film is absolutely a comedy, even as it touches raw nerves head-on: one startling sequence depicts the students training for a school shooting, while another, late in the film, reverberates mightily with the cultural conversations currently swirling around gender relations. In this sense, its artistic grandparent seems to be Amy Heckling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), which likewise confronted big teen issues with a respectful and tasteful comedic appreciation.
The biggest issue here, by far, is social media and smartphones, and the film could be appreciated simply as a furious, comic attack on both. While it’s got more up its sleeve, its depiction of the crippling effects of social media on young people is satisfyingly complete. This is a film I instantly wanted to share with many specific people, as a warning: look how bad these things actually are! Look what they do to our kids!
In targeting social media itself as the villain, Burnham avoids many high-school stereotypes, and while there are some mean girls, they’re portrayed as victims (of social media) too. Likewise, there’s a nerd, but he’s the most surprising and intriguing nerd you’ve seen in a long time, and his big scene is rather incredible.
There’s no schmaltz, no faux tragedy, no bullshit in Burnham’s movie. It’s got integrity, compassion and respect for its subjects and audience. Releasing on January 3rd in Australia, it will have to wait out 2019 to appear on Oz “Best of Year” lists, but I’ll be sure to remember it. It’s a new classic in the teen genre, joining The Edge of Seventeen and Diary of a Teenage Girl from recent years. Excellent, and if you’re a parent, unmissable.