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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
The best teen movies seem to reflect the eras they came from. In the late 1980s, Heathers came around to satirize the social darwinism of high-school society and saw it through to its soot-black conclusion. In the early 2000s, Mean Girls explored the same social dynamics but also with an eye towards identity and devised a utopian solution for the whole thing. In 2016, writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig delivered a teen movie that might be the best possible version of the genre for its time, featuring a main character on the brink of utter despair, who sees the world and everything in it as garbage, and who is utterly at a loss when it comes to figuring out a way to operate within it without being numb or having your spirit slaughtered. Welcome to your current America. Welcome to The Edge of Seventeen.
Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, a high school … well, “outcast” doesn’t seem like exactly the right word since Nadine has actively shunned and despised her peer group en masse. Her father died four years ago, a traumatic event that Nadine is obviously still grappling with, and she’s been left with a mom (Kyra Sedgwick) and brother (Blake Jenner), neither of whom she gets along with. Her only friend in the world is Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), who’s been there for her since she was a grade-schooler. But everything starts to collapse around Nadine when her brother and Krista hook up at a house party. And they want to keep seeing each other.
What’s lovely and refreshing about The Edge of Seventeen is the way that it has fun with Nadine’s messiness while never sneering at her. Part of that comes from Steinfeld’s performance, too. She’s incredibly sympathetic, even (especially?) when Nadine is screwing things up. Steinfeld first came to most of our attention in 2010, when her tough-little-tyke performance in the Coen brothers’ True Grit remake got her an Oscar nomination. Since then, she’s been bouncing between some bad movies (Ender’s Game; Pitch Perfect 2) and some better ones (Begin Again), all while seeming like at any point she might just give up movies to better pursue her music career. But Edge of Seventeen might just be enough anchor her to the movies for a good while longer, especially since the film was so well-received and she got a Golden Globe nomination in the bargain.
The generosity of spirit that Kelly Fremon Craig affords her characters doesn’t stop at Nadine, either. There’s an empathy that extends to everyone from Sedgwick as Nadine’s mom (exasperated and adrift) to her teacher (Woody Harrelson, whose eye-rolling teacher is a delight) to her brother, who is initially presented as every vainglorious thing Nadine says he is, before emerging as a real person at exactly the right time.
And while the film isn’t explicitly a romantic comedy, there is an incredibly sweet and endearing love interest in the form of Hayden Szeto as Erwin, Nadine’s awkward af would-be suitor. The fumbling, socially stunted courtship between these two is so well-balanced, never tipping either to smooth or too dweeby. And with his Justin Long/secret-hottie thing happening, I have big hopes for Szeto going forward. Particularly in a Hollywood landscape that is absolutely screaming for more Asian-American leading men. Here’s the romantic-comedy protagonist you’ve been waiting for, casting directors. Do not waste him.
One criticism? Can we all agree to stop making movies named after Stevie Nicks songs that aren’t allowed to use those Stevie Nicks songs on the soundtrack? It only leads to heartbreak and disappointment for white-winged doves everywhere.
