Because what does he possibly know about being a teenager? When Kayla gets oriented at high school, she befriends the slightly older Olivia (Emily Robinson), who invites her to hang out with her pals at the mall, and there’s another key moment here where she humiliatingly runs into her Dad and pretty much chases him away. Here she meets the proudly nerdy Gabe (Jake Ryan), Kennedy’s cousin, and she likes him a lot, even though she still pines for crush Aiden (Luke Prael), to whom she lies about nude selfies and sex acts about which she knows little.

However, in actuality she’s the opposite of how she wants to be seen, given to bouts of anxiety, voted ‘Most Quiet’ by her classmates, barely acknowledged by the ‘mean girls’ as they endlessly fiddle with their phones, mortified by the presence of her struggling Dad Mark (Josh Hamilton), and addicted to social media (but not Facebook because Elsie herself warned Burnham that it was lame).Īn episodic narrative eventually finds Kayla being painfully obligated to attend a pool party at the fancy home of snooty Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), and when she suffers a panic attack in the bathroom and then must endure a ‘walk of shame’ to the safety of the water, we really feel for her.

Kayla Day (Fisher) is in her final week at Miles Grove Middle School, somewhere in New York, and she’s introduced making upbeat YouTube videos about confidence and positive self-image that almost no one watches. Burnham (a filmmaker, actor, muso, comedian and poet) based elements of his feature début on his own troubled youth, and it’s intriguing that, unlike recent teen-type tales ( Middle School: The Worst Years Of My Life, The Edge Of Seventeen, even Love, Simon), this depicts the whole ghastly school experience as something less than chummy, comedic or awkwardly sexual, and more as an ordeal.

Cinema grade reviews