High school may suck, but with his feature writing/directing debut “Eighth Grade,” comedian Bo Burnham wants to remind us that middle school is no piece of cake either — especially in the social media era.
His movie is a sincere, painful, occasionally funny and beautifully nonjudgmental status report told from the vantage point of a shy, awkward teenager, exquisitely worried into being by a brilliant Elsie Fisher (“McFarland, USA”).
Neither dependent on laughs nor addicted to humiliation, this ripped-from-a-diary gem finds a sweet spot where both authenticity and exaggeration wrestle for the chance to break your heart.
The main reason Kayla Day (Fisher) stands out as a teen heroine is because, unlike the put-upon adolescents of John Hughes’ oeuvre and the post-“Mean Girls” century, she isn’t armed with barbed one-liners and Hollywoodized nerd-cutes. Kayla stammers when on the spot. Sometimes she’s morosely quiet. She has beautiful hair and acne. She swats away attempts at friendly communication from her loving dad (Josh Hamilton), who clearly grasps she’s going through something.
She’ll flirt with a bad decision, mostly involving boys, and though you sigh relief when it goes nowhere — especially with the fast-talker who tries to get her to take her shirt off — there’s a hurt left behind that’s as palpable as anything.
But sometimes Kayla finds reservoirs of courage, as when she reverses the nightmare of being the ignored guest at a sneery-rich classmate’s pool party by taking the mic during karaoke, or makes socializing overtures to a high school girl who treats her kindly. Burnham’s modus operandi is to show the unadorned day-to-day struggle of a regular girl on a desperate campaign to fix her perceived personality failings before the advent of high school only intensifies the pressure. (The movie is set during graduation week of eighth grade.)
Of course, Kayla, like many millennials, believes in the inherent power of the like/click/subscribe world of social media to further her goals. We first…
