Director Bo Burnham’s full-length feature debut, Eighth Grade, is a movie that feels very real in the time and age it was filmed. For a movie to feel this authentic, the individual writing the story and the person behind the camera must be entuned to the nuances and have experienced first-hand what his protagonist has experienced. Burham, at age 28 at the time of this film, isn’t so far removed from the experience that he can give his characters full life and meaning. Still, he is skilled enough to tell a story that is presented in a way that can successfully capture those emotions, progress a storyline, and make an end product that feels both rewarding and entertaining. While I didn’t love this film (I much more preferred the similar Mid90s, which was also about a character around or near 8th grade and released at around the same time as this film), it is an essential watch for persons in the age of 12 to 15 range and also caregivers of children of that age, or even slightly younger and slightly older.

Billed as a comedy, Eighth Grade is anything but. While it did have its share of awkward laughs, this is a story about a girl named Kayla (Elsie Fisher – McFarland, USA, Scales: A Mermaids Tale), who is in her final week of middle school. She creates YouTube videos in which she shares life advice. The one we see her make in the film’s first scene is about being true to yourself and not paying attention to what bad people try to do to you and try to say to you. We see her meager subscriber count and so few people who watch her videos (like this movie review blog but with more success).

Kayla appears confident and assured in her videos but is anything but. She’s as insecure as just about every other eighth-grader on the planet. She just hides it well. Now, while this film does have an R rating, it is by no means as intense or gutwrenching as Mid90s or the 1995 jaw-dropping Kids, a movie that was so far ahead of its time that I think critics unfairly discredited it because they did not want to believe that what they were watching on screen was a realistic portrayal of life. This is a much tamer version of those two movies and a much lighter tone. It could have dropped some of the adult themes and the language and earned a PG-13 rating, but that’s not what Burnham wanted. He wanted a mature audience while not wanting to water down his subject matter.

It’s the last week of school. At a class assembly in the school’s auditorium, as part of the presentation, the superlatives are read by one of the school’s administration members to a lukewarm audience. Kayla receives the “Most Quiet” superlative, which is ironic since she puts her views aside for anyone worldwide to watch. She does have one fan in her father, Mark (Josh Hamilton – Away We Go, J Edgar). If you can stereotype a single dad of a 14-year-old daughter, Mark might be it. He’s kind. He’s loving. He’s curious. He’s protective, but not in a bad way. Kayla thinks he is the most annoying man in the world, but he is not overbearing simply because he is his dad. He establishes the ground rules and follows them as he expects Kayla to. This includes “Do What You Want Friday,” where Kayla is allowed to listen to music on her earbuds and play around on her phone during dinner. He tries to ask the casual question, “How was your day?” or make a loving remark, “I watched your most recent video and liked it a lot,” but whatever he says comes out as “Too Dad.” And he knows that and understands that. It’s a phase. As mentioned, Kayla has done nothing to lose her father’s trust.

Hormones are raging through her body. She has a crush on classmate Aiden (Luke Prael – Boarding School). He’s cool, calm, and collected. Kayla stalks him on Tumblr, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram (Facebook is for adults), just as any ordinary middle school student would. Kayla’s nightly ritual seems to be sitting alone in her room while scrolling through various social media feeds, carefully deciding, like many uncertain persons, about what to like, what not to like, and what to comment on.

We have two significant events in Kayla’s life during this movie, and only one is serious. One involves attending the pool birthday party of the popular Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), who doesn’t have much interest in Kayla, who isn’t a part of the in-crowd. However, Aiden is there, and Kayla tries not to gawk at his nearly naked body. She also meets the geeky Gabe (Jack Ryan – Inside Llewyn Davis, Moonrise Kingdom), a cousin of Kennedy’s who, upon meeting Kayla, challenges her to see who can hold their breath underwater the longest. He’s the perfect antithesis to Aiden, who doesn’t seem too interested in Kayla outside of asking her about naked photos and if she knows how to perform oral sex.

The second significant event revolves around Olivia (Emily Robinson), her mentor in Kayla’s high school shadow program (the eighth-grade students go to the high school they’ll be attending to get an orientation during their last week of middle school). Olivia takes a liking to Olivia and invites her for a night out with her high school friends. There is an incident on the way home that is a bit uncomfortable to watch but not overly so. It’s an important one, though, and one that makes or breaks the movie. It’s handled with care by Burnham. He deeply cares about all his characters; while there are protagonists and antagonists, he keeps this as real as possible. By that, I mean he doesn’t go to the extreme situations that movies like Mid90’s and Kids both did. The situations, themes, motives, and reactions in those movies are entirely valid and real, but they are less likely to happen and on a less frequent basis than those that transposed in Eighth Grade.

As mentioned, this wasn’t a movie made for me. I wasn’t the target audience. With that said, I was a high school teacher for 14 years, and I have ninth-grade students in my class for many of those. And I’ve said this to many friends who aren’t teachers, both of whom have children and do not. The students’ behavior in my class was often so different from their behavior outside of it, like when they were with their friends or, more drastically, when they were with their moms and dads. I saw so many students who were model citizens in my class and would never give me a hard time about anything treat their parents so poorly. There was a dynamic at home that was just different than what they had at school.

With that said, I don’t think that was normal. I look back at my eighth and ninth-grade years and remember being a great student who was really respectful to my teachers and then treating my parents so poorly, giving them a hard time about any request they asked of me. I was 14 and 15 then, and it took another 14 or 15 years before I realized that the only people in this world who would ever have my back, no matter what, were those two people. They loved me in an unconditional way that I’ll likely never experience with another human (my dogs also love me unconditionally, but it’s different). I loved the relationship between Kayla and Mark. I admired the way that the scenes were shot between them. And I loved that he wasn’t an overbearing father but one who also wasn’t distant or aloof. He was patient and kind but was also aware of the dangers of the world and the impressionable period of life that teenagers go through. He teetered that line between wanting to protect and needing to trust perfectly.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 9/10
Character Chemistry 8/10
Acting 8.5/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing  10/10
Cinematography 8/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
86.5%

B-

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• Mid90s
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Booksmart
• The Edge of Seventeen
• I’m Thinking of Ending Things