Review of The Edge of Seventeen (2016) by Andrew M — 31 Mar 2017

For 104 minutes, John Hughes descends from heaven and inhabits Kelly Fremon Craig's beautiful directorial debut. It's easy to compare The Edge of Seventeen to the work of Hughes purely in its existence as a teen coming-of-age dramedy, and many will purely because of that, but it's not the tale of teenage angst and self-discovery itself that makes this feel so Hughesian.

It's the sheer honesty of Craig's characters that propels this from typical coming-of-age film to something greater, something right in line with the likes of Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club.

Hughes had a way of crafting stories that, no matter how far into the ridiculous they went, carried heartfelt themes with genuine characters. Hailee Steinfeld's Nadine Franklin is a straight-up John Hughes protagonist for the millennial generation.

The presentation of Nadine should make her a fairly insufferable presence - she brings her depression to the forefront of her life, and she's oddly talkative for someone so socially inactive - but as we follow her on her journey of social anxieties, we just can't help but look past these flaws and see what she truly is: a troubled teen who just wants things to be right.

Steinfeld's screen presence is immediately hypnotic through her undying charisma, bouncing from the film's brighter moments to its more emotional ones with such natural ease, never missing a beat, showing off the chops that shot her to stardom some six years ago.

She and Craig have managed to craft a character that feels real, for better and worse, and there's perhaps nothing more important in a coming-of-age story. Male or female, young or old, this is a character, and a story as a whole, that everyone can find a piece of themselves in.