This teenage gem is, like, near perfection
THE writer-director of Eighth Grade, 28-yearold Bo Burnham, is best-known as a stand-up comedian. It shows. This film, his debut feature, pulsates with observational tragi-comedy and a perfect ear for teen-speak as 13-year-old Kayla (the superb Elsie Fisher), the, like, angstridden only child of a, like, single father (Josh Hamilton), stumbles through the, like, minefield of early adolescence.
Her dad — loving and well-meaning, but somewhat out of his depth — watches her uneasily as she goes.
Eighth Grade is firmly fixed in a time (now) and a place (suburban America), yet it deals with universal themes applicable to any age. You will laugh, smile and probably wince as you recognise your own 13-year-old self, if not in Kayla, then surely in some of her contemporaries.
I hit puberty with a thud in the mid-Seventies, when the world was a very different place. For one thing, people called Elsie Fisher back then went to bring-and-buy sales with my grandma. For another, there was no such thing as social media, which looms alarmingly large in this film. Yet her anxieties and uncertainties still swept me right back to 1975.
Kayla has few friends, and as an eighth-grader is approaching the end of what the Americans call middle school, and the impending prospect of high school, with trepidation. But she finds constant refuge and balm in her smartphone, even though it is fraught with danger. The likes of Instagram make her feel as if she belongs, yet in some ways isolate her even more. She posts self-improvement videos on You Tube, but hardly anyone sees them.
You don’t have to be the parent of a teenager, merely to have been a teenager yourself, to find two scenes in particular almost painfully forensic in their analysis of the teen condition.
The first comes when Kayla is reluctantly asked to a pool party by one of the princesses in her year, whose mother has forced the invitation on her. Spottier than most of her classmates, and much less pleased with herself in a swimsuit, Kayla’s body-language shrieks with self-consciousness.
Burnham borrows a little here from Mike Nichols’s 1967 masterpiece The Graduate, which is never a bad thing.
The second painful scene takes place on the back seat of a car, where an older boy forces her into a game of Truth or Dare. Her awkwardness, and her feelings of guilt when she feels unable to play along, speak volumes about the demands and degradations of sexual politics in adolescence, especially now for a generation all too familiar with ‘sexting’.
So, while Eighth Grade will be lumped into that genre best described as rites-of-passage or coming-of-age films, it’s better than all but a handful of them.
Burnham has made a minor classic.