The Edge of Seventeen

Katie Billington, Staff Member|December 13, 2016

“The Edge of Seventeen” is a breath of fresh air when it comes to teen comedies.

Nadine (Hailey Steinfeld), a wallflower with a less than positive outlook on life, has spent most of her high school years thinking that she’s less than average. She also fosters a great dislike for her brother Darian (Blake Jenner), the high school’s golden boy who seems to have everything going his way in life. For Nadine, he only reprieve from the ills of being a teenager is her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). When Krista betrays Nadine by sleeping with her brother, she then spends the rest of the movie harboring feelings of rage and loneliness as she tries to figure out how to survive high school without her best friend.

This coming of age story is a shout out to all the teenagers out there that raises the bar of teenage movies. It rivals some of the most memorable teenage movies, such as “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and “Easy A,” due to the strong leading roles and the modern view from a teenager’s perspective. “The Edge of Seventeen” has a certain amount of realism about how people experience their teenage years and how they manage to navigate them, that I can personally resonated with me. This film shows that being a teenager isn’t always the embodiment of the “wonder years” that parents always claim it to be.

There were the constant elements of teen angst, melodrama, and rebelliousness that being caught between childhood and adulthood causes most teenagers to feel and act. Steinfeld’s portrayal of a teenager is practically spot on with her mood swings that can give anyone whiplash, her sarcastic but hilariously truthful retorts, and her completely unrealistic crush on the school’s “bad boy.” The entire cast was able to represent the angst that comes with being a teenager accurately and realistically. Rated R, the dialogue was, for lack of a better word, colorful, which both added to the film and made me laugh. “The Edge of Seventeen” is a painfully realistic movie that reveals the many emotions that can go through a teenager’s mind while surviving high school.