‘I Am Not Okay...’ is charming
‘I Am Not Okay With This’ is a superhero story, but one that fully commits to its ‘young adult’ inspiration
Every teenager has superpowers. Every puberty is an origin story. You transform biologically and change shape; hair begins to grow from your skin; you acquire the terrifying ability to create another human being using cells from your own body.
Superhero stories have played with this connection before, from Spider-Man, with Peter
Parker wrestling with his newfound responsibility and ability to shoot webs, to Marvel’s Runaways on Hulu, in which superpowers are a freighted family legacy. I Am Not Okay With This, whose first season is now streaming on Netflix, is firmly within both the superhero and teen-angst traditions, and, fair warning, is not immune to the clichés of either.
What distinguishes it, however, beyond a tart voice and a pair of engaging performances, is that it commits as fully to its YA (young adult) half as to its biff-powblam half.
Sydney (Sophia Lillis), a disaffected, self-described “boring 17-year-old white girl” in the polluted burg of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, is developing confusing emotional and sexual feelings and a gross patch of acne on her thighs. Also: When she gets angry, she can break things with her mind.
Okay, to its benefit, takes each of these transformations equally seriously. It’s not really even a superhero story per se, though its seven-episode first season may be the introduction to one.
The series is adapted from a graphic novel by Charles Forsman (The End of the ____ing World) by director Jonathan Entwistle and writer Christy Hall. Entwistle was also behind Netflix’s End adaptation, and you see that show’s DNA in the bloody in-medias-res beginning and the opening monologue, in which Sydney gives her diary a four-letter salutation.
Snarky and clad in a chunky sweater she wears like chain mail, Sydney got the diary from a school counsellor as therapy for her anger issues. She has plenty to be mad about. Her father recently committed suicide. She, her mother and her little brother are living hand-to-mouth in a Rust Belt town where she knows few people and likes fewer. And her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), by whom she’s plainly ensorcelled, has started dating a meatheaded jock, Brad (Richard Ellis).
Like the crime-spree tale End, Okay sees adolescence as a time of danger. Also like End, it centres on an alliance, albeit a less felonious one. Unmoored by Dina, Sydney strikes up a mutual sarcasm pact with Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), an affable weirdo and extremely small-time pot dealer who becomes her would-be boyfriend and, as her powers reveal themselves, self-appointed sidekick.
Lillis and Oleff are the two wires that give Okay its spark and tingle. Sydney may shop at the same vintage store as decades of alienated teens before her, but Lillis distinctively embodies her balled-up nerves and rubbed-raw discomfort in her own skin — when she says, “Sometimes I feel like I’m boiling inside,” the burn is palpable. And Oleff plays a familiar geek-neighbour species (Homo Briankrakowus) with a laid-back egolessness that pushes straight through nerdery into cool.
I Am Not Okay With This may not surprise you much, but it has charm and voice to spare. And bucking the streaming-TV bloat trend, it runs seven energetic episodes of around 20 minutes apiece. A story about raging hormones and elemental forces, after all, should know the power of a swift explosion.