Hello 12, hello 13, hello ‘likes’ in the age of techno-anxiety
Tender, socially reticent, selectively assertive, Kayla is a middle school student a few days away from graduation and the rest of her life. “Everything will work out,” she tells her scant audience of YouTube channel followers in the video post opening Bo Burnham’s new film “Eighth Grade,” if “you’re just being yourself.” She’s hoping for the best with that one. This kid knows it’s not going to be so easy. But wishing (and then posting) might just make it so.
Kayla’s everyday concerns conspire against her, the way the typical posture-wrecking backpack of the graduating eighthgrader works against its owner’s nascent swagger. At that weird age everything’s changing, above and below the neck. Meanness floats from host body to host body everywhere, sanctioned by the culture, facilitated by the vicious circles of social media. Life can be harsh, and half (or more) of any given classroom or social clique or hallway seems to be developmentally miles ahead of the other half.
“Eighth Grade” evokes all that, in a drum-tight, very effective hour and a half. It can fall prey to slick efficiency and well-meaning, heartfelt contrivance, as Burnham puts you through the wringer and ensures your empathetic excruciation. But Elsie Fisher is fantastically natural and heartbreaking as Kayla. She’s all the film really needs.
Burnham’s debut feature as writer-director knows well the agitating seductions of our online lives. As a comic, Burnham’s rise to fame owed a lot to the internet, and lately he’s expressed real, reflective ambivalence about how it’s messing with kids’ selfimages and empathetic impulses.
Kayla lives with her father (Josh Hamilton), whose wife, we hear at one point in the film, “left us.” A compulsive joker, Kayla’s dad is a little too relieved when his daughter gets invited to the birthday pool party of one of the bitchy cool kids, Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere). This is on orders from Kennedy’s mother, and Kayla knows it.
Nonetheless she goes to the party, enduring an anxiety attack of sorts in the bathroom and then turning weak in the knees at the sight of her crush (Luke Prael). In the water, she meets another, more approachable and voluble boy, Gabe (Jake Ryan).
Among other things, Burnham’s film is a story of sex and all the mysterious terrors it represents.
Where “Eighth Grade” is at its best is when it leaves its surefire, stereotype-dependent John Hughes instincts aside to focus on more interesting things. The movie’s full of them, some funny (the “first-hangout” quasi-date between Kayla and Gabe, over microwaved chicken strips and a variety of sauces), some harrowing (in one nighttime car scene, Kayla’s coerced to the brink of fooling around, uncomfortably, with a calculating older boy). Anna Meredith’s musical score adds a thick layer of electronica, which can feel intrusive.
But Burnham’s skill with his actors is pretty remarkable. The writer-director captures the tetchy rhythms of teen/parent strife. “Text me when you’re here and DON’T COME INSIDE!” Kayla says, speaking in embarrassed, hushed tones by phone to her dad, looking for a quick rescue from the pool party ordeal.
“You can’t be brave without being scared,” she says in one YouTube posting. I like the movie. I love the performance.