Butler's Cinema Scene

Elsie Fisher

“EIGHTH GRADE” My rating: A-

94 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Middle school means isolation, mortification and general angst. Such was the case even before cell phones and the internet upped the ante on  peer pressure.

Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” perfectly captures that indefinable sense of adolescent unease.  You may find yourself looking away from the screen as his 14-year-old heroine undergoes yet another wince-inducing humiliation. This film is so true in its harrowing honesty, so aching in its inarticulate yearning that it is almost too much to bear.

But stick with it. With its savagely dead-on sense of humor, its unflinching depiction of pubescent peril and a star-making performance by young Elsie Fisher, the film slowly sucks us in, leaving us wiser, more sympathetic and superbly entertained.

The film follows Kayla (Fisher), a 14-year-old enduring her last week of eighth grade before summer break.  She wants desperately to be somebody — from her bedroom she launches a chirpy daily videocast (“Hi, guys, it’s Kayla back with another video!?”) in which she dispenses advice to her fellow 8th graders. She suspects, though, that nobody  is watching.

And there’s more than a little irony when she tells her possibly nonexistent viewers that  it’s important to be themselves.  As if she has a clue as to her own essence.

It’s not that the other kids are mean to Kayla.  Most of them — like the deb-in-training Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere) — don’t  even acknowledge her existence. That anonymity is both infuriating and suffocating.

All this has made Kayla a very prickly young lady, and she takes out most of her anger and anxiety on her single dad (Josh Hamilton), a chipper optimist whose transparent efforts to instill in his daughter hope and self-worth only fill her with eye-rolling contempt.

Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton

Burnham — making his film debut at age 27 — devotes the first half of “8th Grade” to chronicling Kayla’s near-constant state of embarrassment.

There’s the swimming-themed birthday party for “it” girl Kennedy (Kayla is only invited because Kennedy’s mom and Kayla’s dad worked together on some school-related project), where in a sea of svelt girls in bikinis our heroine stands out in an unfashionable lime-green one-piece that only accentuates her ample thighs and tummy.

While she yearns hopelessly for the romantic-eyed Aiden (Luke Prael), she finds herself by Gabe (Jake Ryan), the geekiest guy in the pool.

But after rubbing our noses in Kayla’s misery, Turnham uses the film’s second act to slowly introduce moments of hope.

There is, for instance, Kayla’s pairing with an older girl, Olivia (Emiliy Robinson), during a field trip to the high school she will attend next year.  Olivia and her buds not only pay attention to the visitor, they take Kayla under their wing, asking her about herself and treating her more or less as an equal.

Middle school sucks, Olivia advises, but she’s sure Kayla will rock it when she gets to high school.

And even Kayla’s pathetically eager-to-be-a-bud father comes through for her with one of the most heartfelt declarations of love and support ever spoken by concerned parent to unhappy child.  Bring hankies.

(That’s two great films in recent weeks depicting a single father’s relationship with his daughter…the other is “Leave No Trace.” Apparently it’s some sort of trend.)

Burnham, who got his show-biz start doing online videos, is close enough to his characters’ age that he remembers what middle school was like.  And he has enough storytelling flair to present Kayla’s predicament with just the right touch of absurd hilarity.

| Robert W. Butler