17-year old Nadine has felt out of place since she was small. When her best friend since childhood, Krista, takes up with her hated older brother Darian, Nadine feels even more isolated than usual, and her Drama Queen antics lead in an even more negative direction than usual.
Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, and I have rather liked this young woman's performances since she first exploded in the Coen Brothers' True Grit. In this movie, she plays Nadine brilliantly.
The trouble is that Nadine is not very likeable and not very believable. She actually has quite a nice life, being well provided for by her single-parent mother, and also enjoying the fact that her brother takes on various parental roles, notwithstanding normal sibling antagonism.
So when she utterly selfishly forces her best friend to make the choice of her brother or her, she loses any audience sympathy she may have had, and it wasn't much to start with. And the sequence where she accidentally sends a sexually explicit text to a boy she fancies, goes out with him when he responds, and is then horrified when he expects her to deliver on the text - well, words failed me, notwithstanding "No" means "no.".
Perhaps it's an accurate reflection of teenage angst, but it's quite different to the teenage angst I went through.
And the resolution of the film was glib beyond belief - here is a youngster, who on the basis of what the film shows us, has been somewhat socially inept, or worse, since childhood, and all of a sudden she develops a sunny disposition towards others simply because of some home truths and a new friendship? I don't buy it. She should be in counselling.
If it's not obvious, let me spell it out: the trailer sells this as a teen comedy, but it's not. It's a character-driven drama, albeit with some amusing moments. A slight and everyday drama, to be sure, but a drama nevertheless. The trailer deceives.
It's not all negative. As well as Steinfeld's undoubted skill in selling her character, the film also benefits from Woody Harrelson as a humorously cynical teacher, and the luminously lovely Haley Lu Richardson as Krista, some decent support work among the rest of the cast, and sufficient interest in the characters to keep your attention throughout.
Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, and I have rather liked this young woman's performances since she first exploded in the Coen Brothers' True Grit. In this movie, she plays Nadine brilliantly.
The trouble is that Nadine is not very likeable and not very believable. She actually has quite a nice life, being well provided for by her single-parent mother, and also enjoying the fact that her brother takes on various parental roles, notwithstanding normal sibling antagonism.
So when she utterly selfishly forces her best friend to make the choice of her brother or her, she loses any audience sympathy she may have had, and it wasn't much to start with. And the sequence where she accidentally sends a sexually explicit text to a boy she fancies, goes out with him when he responds, and is then horrified when he expects her to deliver on the text - well, words failed me, notwithstanding "No" means "no.".
Perhaps it's an accurate reflection of teenage angst, but it's quite different to the teenage angst I went through.
And the resolution of the film was glib beyond belief - here is a youngster, who on the basis of what the film shows us, has been somewhat socially inept, or worse, since childhood, and all of a sudden she develops a sunny disposition towards others simply because of some home truths and a new friendship? I don't buy it. She should be in counselling.
If it's not obvious, let me spell it out: the trailer sells this as a teen comedy, but it's not. It's a character-driven drama, albeit with some amusing moments. A slight and everyday drama, to be sure, but a drama nevertheless. The trailer deceives.
It's not all negative. As well as Steinfeld's undoubted skill in selling her character, the film also benefits from Woody Harrelson as a humorously cynical teacher, and the luminously lovely Haley Lu Richardson as Krista, some decent support work among the rest of the cast, and sufficient interest in the characters to keep your attention throughout.