A hilarious and achingly real coming-of-age story.
“I had a terrible thought, that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life with myself,” says Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine, the teenage girl at the center of Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen. It’s one of the many moments in the film that will likely come out of nowhere and hit you square in the gut, transporting you from your movie theatre seat back to a faraway memory when you had a similar realization, and while it might not have come while you were throwing up into your own bathroom toilet like Nadine, it manages to feel heartbreakingly real and relatable nonetheless. In the end, the same can essentially be said for the entirety of The Edge of Seventeen.
Written and directed by Fremon Craig, the film introduces us to Steinfeld’s Nadine on the brink of committing suicide at the age of 17, coming to her ambivalent, smart ass high school history teacher (played brilliantly by Woody Harrelson) for help, before we’re filled in with the rest of the important details of her life. These include flashback scenes to her as a young girl meeting her best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), for the first time. But following a personal tragedy that fractures her family into pieces, Nadine is sent into a spiral of loneliness and short-sighted mistakes once she becomes aware of a burgeoning relationship between Krista and her stereotypically perfect, jock brother, Darian (Blake Jenner).
It’s a typical coming-of-age movie plot, and is told with the same sarcastic, crass tone that made films like The Breakfast Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High such huge hits back in the 1980s. Similar to those movies as well, The Edge of Seventeen succeeds because of Fremon Craig’s dedication to her characters, taking the time to fill in every single character with the kind of motivations, history, and depth that doesn’t leave them feeling like archetypes, as villains or heroes in Nadine’s life, but as people trying to do the best they can, just like her. Where Darian may have been left as the shallow, muscle-head that Nadine spends most of her life seeing him as, Fremon Craig makes his issues feel just as important and understandable as his sister’s, and Jenner and Steinfeld take that material and run with it from there, creating one of the most realistic and emotional sibling bonds we’ve seen onscreen in quite some time.
Ever since her breakout debut in The Coen Brothers’ True Grit back in 2011 too, Steinfeld has been in desperate search of a role that offered her the same opportunity for stardom. Most of those attempts were done with varying degrees of success, but in Nadine, she’s given us her best performance to date. Never shying away from her character’s obvious flaws, or leaning too heavily into the awkward teenage stereotype that lesser actresses might have, she’s established herself as one of the most promising actresses of her generation. Nadine feels just as authentic as the lead female characters in any of the iconic John Hughes’ films of the past, but is treated with even more affection and understanding than any of Molly Ringwald’s red-haired heroines.
The parallels to the work of filmmakers like Hughes or Cameron Crowe don’t stop there either, and Fremon Craig recognizes that Hughes’ coming-of-age films were successful because they felt like movies made about teenagers by someone who actually understood them, rather than an adult just trying to appeal to them. In the '90s and 2000s, the number of relatable and iconic films in that same vein began to decrease to a staggering degree. In the past few years even, we’ve only seen a number of truly memorable films about teenagers (that didn’t have technological or magical powers anyways).
In fact, perhaps the best modern coming-of-age film of recent memory has been 2012’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which somehow managed to understand '90s kids better than most films about '90s kids made in that time period were even able to. But what made Perks stand out from the rest was the love and care that it gave its characters, so much so that by the time it was over you ended up loving them as if they were your best friends. The Edge of Seventeen accomplishes a similar feat, which features brilliant performances from all of its cast members, who, like Fremon Craig, seem to love their characters with such passion and fervor that you wind up sympathizing and understanding each and every single one of them, whether they’re actively helping Nadine solve her problems or not.
It’s because of all of this that The Edge of Seventeen is brimming with life from beginning to end, told with an eye for specificity, that gives it a vibrant, emotional wisdom that we very rarely see from the genre these days. Fremon Craig understands that the road to accepting yourself is a long and hard one, paved with the kinds of challenges that for some reason seem so much easier in hindsight than they did in the moment, like walking up to a circle of strangers and hoping they’ll let you in. Don’t be surprised when this becomes the kind of movie that helps to get kids through high school, offering them not just the possibility that things will in fact get better, but also giving them the credit that their problems aren’t less valid than an anyone else’s, which as it turns out is the best compliment I can give The Edge of Seventeen.
The Verdict
Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen is a pitch-perfect portrait of youth, and the struggles of learning to accept yourself for who you are. It’ll have you laughing and crying, sometimes in the same scene, and never feels anything other than sincere and authentic.
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