It\u2019s a sure-handed and sensitive tribute to the most awkward age.<\/b>
\nThree beeps, and then a grainy camera image of a young girl, her face looking suspiciously airbrushed. \u201cHey, guys!\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s Kayla, back with another video!\u201d
In a rambling monologue laced with \u201cums\u201d and \u201clikes,\u201d Kayla (Elsie Fisher) explains that the topic of this video is \u201cbeing yourself,\u201d which \u201ccan be hard\u201d because it\u2019s \u201cnot very easy.\u201d She concludes with her signature sign-off \u2014 a hand signal and a peppy, if slightly mystifying \u201cGucci!\u201d \u2014 and reaches forward to turn off the camera on her computer.
In almost any other film this would be the start of a condescending scene, one that\u2019s meant to expose the vapidity of the Kids These Days and poke fun, especially, at teenage girls. But Eighth Grade is not that film. It\u2019s written and directed by Bo Burnham, the wildly popular YouTube comedian \u2014 that phrase alone may turn you off, but stick with me here \u2014 and it is a startlingly empathetic, wincingly honest, and always completely charming story of a girl living out the last week of her eighth grade year and coming to terms with herself, at least a little.
Eighth Grade lit up Sundance when it premiered there earlier this year; it\u2019s the sort of film that makes anyone who\u2019s already out of their teenage years grateful that they don\u2019t have to live them now. A sensitive movie about growing up surrounded by cameras you\u2019re operating yourself, it\u2019s the sort of story that probably had to be made by a filmmaker who knows that terrain intimately.
But eighth grade is eighth grade, no matter what generation you\u2019re in. And that means that Eighth Grade is for all of us.
Today\u2019s eighth graders aren\u2019t millennials. Members of the ominously titled \u201cGeneration Z,\u201d they\u2019ve been using social media since they were kids (they don\u2019t use Facebook, but are all over Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube) and are used to being both their own photographer and their own subject.
You could call them the \u201cselfie\u201d generation and make some facile analysis about narcissism, but that\u2019s too easy. Everybody figures out who they are by watching how others react to them; that was just as true for our great-great grandparents as it is now. The difference is that those reactions have migrated to a more concrete form: likes, comments, and follows. You know exactly how many people think (or at least say they think) that you look good today, instead of trying to read it in their facial expressions, because Instagram will tell you. See me. Tell me I\u2019m real.
That\u2019s both terrifying and weirdly comforting, and it spills into real life. Eighth Grade captures well the feeling that everyone is looking at you and thinking about you, and the overwhelming desire to make yourself as attractive to their gaze as possible. Not necessarily sexually attractive \u2014 just cool enough to be liked by the people around you.
It\u2019s not like adults don\u2019t have that impulse. But for a lot of us it peaks right around age 13, which is also, unfortunately, when a lot of us are in peak awkward mode, just at the start of puberty.
Eighth Grade \u2019s Kayla is right there, too. She lives with her father (Mark Day), who raised her after her mother left, when Kayla was very young. Besides her YouTube channel, Kayla maintains an active, filter-heavy Instagram presence; we see her carefully applying makeup and doing her hair with the aid of YouTube tutorials (too real, amirite), then getting back into bed and snapping a \u201cjust woke up like this\u201d picture to post before she heads to school.
The film tracks the last week of Kayla\u2019s eighth grade year, a week that turns out to be important for her. The class \u201csuperlatives\u201d are announced \u2014 Kayla is voted \u201cmost quiet,\u201d to her chagrin. The kids receive time capsules they made for themselves at the beginning of sixth grade. Kayla goes to a pool party hosted by the class\u2019s coolest girl, Kennedy. She shadows a high school student named Olivia (Emily Robinson) through an entire school day and panics over what to wear when she\u2019s invited to go to the mall with Olivia\u2019s friends. She thirsts mightily after her class\u2019s heartthrob, Aiden (Luke Prael). And she tries, with all her might, to feel like the thing she\u2019s always wanted to be: the \u201ccoolest girl in the world.\u201d
All these things seem trivial from an adult perspective, but when you\u2019re 13 they matter so, so very much. Eighth Grade gets that. It\u2019s a very funny movie, but the audience laughs are more laughs of painful recognition than derision. Of course it\u2019s funny that Aiden is, in reality, a scrawny and not particularly interesting kid, but who doesn\u2019t look back at their teenaged crush with a raised eyebrow? Yes, watching Kayla step reluctantly onto the pool deck in her one-piece bathing suit, surrounded by a sea of girls in bikinis, is cringe-inducing, but it\u2019s also bound to provoke a chuckle from anyone who remembers what it felt like to feel that different from everyone else.
Like other recent and upcoming films \u2014 Ingrid Goes West, Skate Kitchen \u2014 Eighth Grade gently probes the anxieties that come with a world in which online presences bleed into reality, and vice versa. On Instagram you can crop and filter and control your image. And while you know you\u2019re doing that, there\u2019s an impulse to believe that nobody else is. Everyone else\u2019s skin and house and life is as perfect as it\u2019s presented. It\u2019s only you who\u2019s a mess.
Adults should theoretically be able to make that separation in a healthy and productive manner, but at 13, all bets are off. So while Kayla is immensely excited by any indication that she\u2019s actually being treated like the version of herself she projects to the world, she knows that\u2019s not really her, and it\u2019s almost too much to bear.
But Eighth Grade doesn\u2019t do the boring thing, condemning social media for causing the problem. It knows there\u2019s an upside, too. We see how being behind her camera also helps Kayla see that she is someone who\u2019s funny and smart and could maybe even be confident. Some of that practicing to be cool might eventually bleed out into her real life.
And so Eighth Grade gets something extremely right about not just the selfie generation, but what it is to grow up today. Burnham deftly, almost miraculously evokes the awkwardness, the anxiety, the fears, and the small joys that are littered along the road to adulthood. It\u2019s not like Kayla\u2019s problems are fixed by the end; even her loving father can\u2019t just wave a hand and make things better.
But eighth grade is only a year long. High school holds its own joys and terrors. So does college. So does adulthood. We\u2019re all just trying to be ourselves.
Eighth Grade opens in theaters on July 13.<\/p>\n

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