Coming-of-ager receives high marks
Listen up, people. Kayla is on YouTube and she’s got some life advice.
Be yourself, OK? Even if you don’t know who you are yet.
Sure, Kayla is only 13, but she understands a few things — or suspects them, at any rate. She hasn’t experienced much in her own life yet, but she’s about to, in the exquisite awkwardness that is Bo Burnham’s Eighth
Grade, a coming-of-ager that would make this Sundance discovery an excellent double bill with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.
Despicable Me voice actress Elsie Fisher makes for an irresistible introvert as Kayla, who YouTubes a one-girl show nobody watches — OK, maybe a nerd or two — and who lives the suckage that is the black hole between middle school, where she is now, and high school, where she’ll soon be landing. The thought excites and terrifies her.
Kayla is full of advice in the online realm but unsteady as she goes in real life. She has acne, but who doesn’t? She’s clueless at clanging the cymbals in her school band’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but have you heard the rest of the band?
She’s very sweet, except for when she’s not, which is usually when her tries-too-hard dad (Josh Hamilton) is bugging her to get her face out of her phone and talk to him. (Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” makes good sound- track music for digital daydreaming.)
Kayla is tired of people calling her shy, although she is when the camera’s not on: “I’m not, like, quiet. I just choose not to talk at school.”
This is writer/director Burnham’s feature filmmaking debut, and he knows something about YouTube, having been an earlier viral sensation on that most mass of media.
He also intuits, as well as any grown man possibly could, what it’s like to be someone in Kayla’s awkward station of life.
He’s similarly attuned to all the kids around Kayla who are also feeling like round pegs in square holes. Like that boy sniffing the magic marker, or the girl struggling to carry a giant knapsack.
And how about that school drill about what to do if an armed assailant shows up? Comical in its clumsiness, but it’s a reminder to everybody that today’s world isn’t an easy fit for anybody.
The film’s main drama is of the after-school-special variety, but no less important for it. Kayla has to endure the scorn of a mean girl named Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), the icky attention of a geek named Gabe (Jake Ryan) and the too-coolfor-school poses of a boy named Aiden (Luke Prael), who she wishes would give her a second look.
Good thing Kayla has the support and friendship (omigod!) of Olivia (Emily Robinson), a mentoring high schooler.
Kayla just has to keep reminding herself to be herself: “Being yourself is not changing yourself to impress someone else.” Easier said than done, but Fisher is such a vital presence amidst the emotional turbulence. Everybody who has been through eighth grade needs to see Eighth Grade.