‘The Edge of Seventeen’ navigates high school angst with wit and empathy

No matter your age or year of graduation, there will be one high school movie that sticks out as your ultimate viewing experience.

Edge of Seventeen boasts a razor-sharp script for its genre. Its verbal style informed by numerous interviews that Fremon Craig conducted with teenagers nationwide, “The Edge of Seventeen” never descends into a “Juno”-esque quirkfest”. The best dialogue exchanges come from Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson, who plays one of her teachers. Edge of Seventeen is a much better coming-of-age story than Craig’s previous screenwriting effort, Post Grad. Though she’s worked with directors from John Carney to the Coen brothers to Elizabeth Banks, Steinfeld says Craig, as a first-time director, brought a unique sensitivity to the set that made this shoot special. It gave me the feeling of graduating from being that person and letting all of that built-up teen angst and emotion and bitterness and excitement and happiness and nervousness and everything go. This can be seen especially in scenes where she freaks out because of the music she must face as a teenager growing up.

How, then, to make Nadine sympathetic to audiences without sanding off her rough edges?

Conventionally but effectively filmed, with a nicely mood-setting soundtrack (though absent the Stevie Nicks song of the title), “The Edge of Seventeen” gently and patiently readjusts Nadine’s low opinion of herself – and, just as important, of the friends and family in her midst.

The comedic moments are punctured with the dramatic ones. The structure gets wonky when she runs out of ideas, even sending Nadine to the playground and then to the yogurt shop for many minutes to have a kind of epiphany, á la Cher’s moment in Clueless – Amy Heckerling has her heroine strolling by well-timed fountains and getting distracted by designer sales (her passion) as she comes to realize she’s in love with her ex-stepbrother. Viewed right now, at this time in history, the things that drive her mad seem touchingly minor – feelings that will embarrass her later on, when she discovers there’s bigger matters worth worrying about. A lot of times actresses would walk in, and they’d have one thing and not the other. Steinfeld can trade barbs with Harrelson, perfectly cast as Weary Grown-Up With Hidden Gold Heart; she can do awkward, flirty, sassy and screwball (her reaction to a pre-date smelling of her pits is Swiss-clock comic-timed); and, in one of the movie’s best scenes, she can communicate the crumbling heartbreak of watching Krista get caught up among the Cool Girls without saying a single word. “I really wanted it to be a movie about a girl who just happens to be seventeen”, she explains. These issues are introduced and forgotten, and never thoroughly explored. “He played football and I was a cheerleader on the team with all the older girls”, she says. The dialogue is terrible in these scenes as well, relying too heavily on cliché. This sentiment is only amplified by Nadine’s flawless twin brother (Blake Jenner), who seems to have it all: looks, friends and their mother’s (Kyra Sedgwick) affection. Thank you for that brilliant advice, Darian. It’s a line delivered with a just-joking snap, and just enough of an edge that you know she’s not just joking.

Hailee Steinfeld: I think it definitely nailed our form of communication: how it affects us, how it affects the way we meet people, how it affects our perception of them. Numerous film’s plotlines are approached this way, with much of the material between the initial conflict and the emotional payoff disappearing into the fray. So it’s no surprise when the protagonist refers to herself as an old soul, recalls her best friend being dressed like an old man when they first met, and declares to a would-be suitor that when she looks at him, she sees an old man.