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So raise a hand, who here remembers eighth grade? That weird, transitionary period between middle school and high school, puberty attacking you daily and trying desperately to be mature? Whether it was in the days before Snapchat, before YouTube, before Google, before AOL, before modems, before disco, before Woodstock, or whenever, it’s hard. Not as hard as ninth grade, but still.
Eighth Grade comes from first time writer/director Bo Burnham, a stand-up comedian who got his start on the Internet and is not a teen girl. The movie stars Elsie Fisher as Kayla, living in a nondescript everyday American suburb with her dad Mark (Josh Hamilton). It’s only a few weeks before the end of Kayla’s eighth grade year, and things are complicated. Kayla has been making a series of advice and how-to YouTube videos, about being yourself and doing well in school, but there’s a strong juxtaposition to the awkward way Kayla acts around the rest of the world.
Kayla has a crush on a classmate and wants to make friends, which she often struggled with. Her dramatic world hinges on worries about fitting in, attending a swim party, hoping to find a boyfriend, and worrying about the future. And it is just fantastic.
The movie is at turns sad, cringe-inducing, and hilarious. It feels real and true to life, like the way eighth graders would actually act and talk, not like caricatures or the ancient thoughts of an old studio executive. It helps that these actors are all playing basically the same age as the characters, as they all seem like real kids.
Elsie Fisher is a revelation, previously only really known for a voice role in the Despicable Me movies. She effortlessly disappears into this character of Kayla, so that you get this character in an instant. The adventures of a girl wanting so much and feeling so much, it’s building up to a point where many will likely feel as deeply as her.
One of the great strengths of the movie is the way it handles the score and direction, the music enhancing the comedy in diegetic and nondiegetic ways, and at times underscore dramatic moments to take something that might seem small and explode it to massive proportions. In the world of someone in the world of middle school, every conversation can be a battle, every social event a war, every embarrassing moment a potential bomb about to detonate.
I think that coming of age films tend not to explore this sort of stage of life, it’s far, far more common to have them about high schoolers or even pre-teen kids. There’s something magical in that potential of transition that Eighth Grade immaculately manages to convey at every turn. Kayla isn’t the next genius god of high school, in many ways, she could be every girl in America. Or every person that might be worried about what other people think or what the future might bring.
I am very impressed by what Bo Burnham created here, and I hope he gets the chance to make something beautiful again.
Eighth Grade has a run time of 1 hour 33 minutes and is rated R for language and some sexual material.
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