In the shadow of this summer’s testosterone-heavy blockbusters, the teenage-girl-coming-of-age film is quietly but unmistakably having a moment.
The buzziest right now is Bo Burnham’s indie breakout Eighth Grade: It’s already gone wide to net over $10 million at the box office, is a critical darling and has even inspired special screenings for actual eighth graders across the country. Telling the story of shy YouTuber Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the film nails the awfulness of middle school and captures how social media platforms complicate growing up for Generation Zers today.
But while it offers a fresh, insider perspective on youth culture, the movie’s bones are similar to what we’re used to seeing in coming-of-age films focused on girls, dating back to the Molly Ringwald/John Hughes days: A girl wants a boy to like her, and this drives much of the plot. In Eighth Grade, when it’s clear the cool boy Kayla likes is not an option, in steps another boy — this time one who really gets her. It’s a familiar tale.
In the rest of this summer’s teen-girl-led film slate, however, romance is refreshingly secondary, if even mentioned at all; these other movies are all about the platonic connections that motivate and sustain the diverse young women, none of whom are looking to be saved. While they’re still teenagers — naïve, imperfect and sometimes silly — these new teen heroines are also sometimes wise and savvy beyond their years. They casually smoke marijuana and use Instagram to find their tribe. They love without completely losing themselves. These girls — not a far cry from 2018’s iconic teen, Parkland High School activist Emma Gonzalez — are both powerful and vulnerable, and heroic on their own terms.
Not coincidentally, the current teen-girl starrers that deliver the most layered portrayals of girlhood today are also helmed by women writer-directors. Like the heroines of their films, these women are living and working at a time when, as writer Rebecca Traister puts it, “across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration.”
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In Leave No Trace, the stunning second feature from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Debra Granik, the “love story” is between a father, Will (Ben Foster), and his 15-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie). Will is a war veteran coping with PTSD by raising Tom off-the-grid in the Oregon wild.
In Jordana Spiro’s meditative debut feature Night Comes On, the love explored is also of a familial sort: The bond of two sisters — Angel (Dominique Fishback), age 18, and Abby (Tatum Marilyn Hall), age 10 — helps them navigate life in and outside of the foster care system.
Crystal Moselle’s delightful drama Skate Kitchen never loses sight of the importance of female friendship, imbuing the film about an all-girl skateboarding crew in New York City with an endearing feminist spirit. In fact, it isn’t until two-thirds of the way through the movie that a messy teen romance between new girl Camille (Rachel Vinberg) and skater dude Devin (Jaden Smith) figures into the story. And by shooting the skating sequences at slightly slower speeds than normal, Mozelle elevates skateboarding into a kind of choreographed dance, suggesting that for these girls, their passion isn’t about being daredevils; it’s about a pure love for the board and each other.
Similarly, in Augustine Frizzel’s fun stoner comedy Never Goin’ Back, platonic soulmates Angela (The Fosters’ Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Camila Morrone) never let the clueless guys in their orbit come between them as they blow their money on a beach vacation and have to scramble to pay rent.
And Josephine Decker’s daring indie feature Madeline’s Madeline uses the setting of an experimental theater company to delve into the spinning psyche of a promising teen actress (Helena Howard).
Part of what unites these films is that their narratives are all propelled by a girl’s desire to know herself. Over the course of Leave No Trace, Tom develops more clarity about what she wants and who she is than some women twice her age. After she rescues her seriously injured father, they temporarily settle in a rural RV park so he can recuperate. There, she finds the community that she’s been longing for, including a mother figure in groundskeeper Val (Dale Dickey). She ultimately decides to stay on in the trailer park, boldly declaring to her father: “The thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me.” It’s what we have been wanting to hear for most of the movie — that Will’s illness is stifling his daughter’s growth, and that’s not fair. In another kind of film, it would be a wise adult who says this, who saves the girl. But in Granik’s film, it’s Tom who saves herself. Leave No Trace is a riveting portrait of a teen girl’s journey toward a defining declaration of independence that carries as much dramatic weight as any girl-meets-boy setup.
The fact that these coming-of-age films focus on concerns other than romance doesn’t mean sexual desire goes unexplored. The Skate Kitchen girls are straight, queer and fluid, and it’s not a big deal to them. They have lively discussions about everything from consent to receiving oral sex; the film is a rare non-judgmental depiction of teen girls who have a healthy relationship to their sexuality — one that centers their own power and pleasure.
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In Night Comes On, Angel gets out of juvie and goes to her ex-girlfriend Maya’s house, where she gets a rude awakening that Maya has moved on. Soon after, Angel dances with a cute girl in a club. There’s no coming-out moment or the kind of intense grappling with queerness that we saw, for example, in Dee Rees’ important coming-of-age film Pariah; Angel is just gay, living her life. Meanwhile, though Frizzell alludes to Angela and Jessie making out in Never Goin’ Back, she purposefully avoids that low-hanging fruit onscreen and instead presents a messy, all-consuming adolescent female friendship in which kissing doesn’t necessarily equal romance.
Madeline’s Madeline is in many ways the most radical of all these films in its willingness to distance its teen girl protagonist from the usual possibilities of romance and flirtation with male peers. The film goes deep inside the mind of a depressed and talented young woman who plays the lead in an experimental theater piece where she’s completely surrounded by adults. Madeline defies easy categorization. The black daughter of her white mother Regina (Miranda July), she has mentally ill episodes and has been off her medication for a week. She is often a classic teen: moody, impulsive, demanding, manipulative. But when Decker puts Madeline onstage, we can’t take our eyes off her as she seamlessly transforms into scores of characters. Instead of reducing Madeline to a type — “tortured outsider” or “mean girl” — the pic challenges us to recognize her complexity, what makes her exceptional. This film says a girl’s wounded psyche is worth exploring.
Perhaps that’s what feels freshest about the recent slate of girl coming-of-age movies: They’re infused with a rare, intense, often aching empathy for the kind of unconventional young female characters whose stories are only just beginning to be fully told.
