The Edge of Seventeen

Kelly Fremon Craig sent the script to James L. Brooks in 2011 as Besties, and his first instruction was to research, not write. She spent six months interviewing teenagers around the country and hanging around high schools and dances. Brooks’s threshold: hear something three times and it is universal. Apart from technology, she found, everything matched her own memory, and wherever a kid sat on the social ladder the feeling was identical: everybody is fine except me. The humiliations here read as collected, not invented. Casting Nadine took a year; Craig knew the voice on hearing Hailee Steinfeld. The story is set in Portland but was shot in autumn 2015 at a high school and mall in suburban Vancouver, with China’s Huayi Brothers among the producers. It took 18.8 million dollars on a 9 million budget. Steinfeld drew a Golden Globe nomination for lead actress in a musical or comedy, which Emma Stone won for La La Land; Craig shared the New York Film Critics Circle first film prize with Trey Edward Shults of Krisha. A good fit if you want Nadine unfair and hard to bear for a long stretch, the film in no hurry to forgive her. Not for anyone taking the Woody Harrelson teacher for a mentor: the Bruner scenes mock Nadine rather than validate her.