School maze

Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade is a little gem about school days, the facts of life and the existential perils of being 14 or so years old.

Kayla (the indefatigable Elsie Fisher) is an eighth-grader, a bright, wistful, underappreciated loner, edging hesitantly toward the “transition” to her high school years. Struggling for self-respect as well as the respect, or at least the attention, of her peers, she is both a self-motivated work in progress and a distinctively individual example of the emotional awkwardness and the reflexive self-consciousness of the archetypal 14-year-old.

Burnham’s script centers on the final weeks of Kayla’s year in the eighth grade, with stages of her quest emerging through a series vignettes—school-related events, extracurricular activities, her mildly fraught home life, the clumsy experimenting of early teen socializing, etc. And the action as a whole is punctuated (and bookended) with examples from Kayla’s advice-filled blog.

Much of Eighth Grade has a near-documentary feel to it, and it’s to the credit of Burnham and his mostly young cast that they’re able to manage such a graceful balance between brash honesty and tender ironies. The film’s approach to its characters, including a couple of the adults, is kindly without being rankly sentimental, and ironic without being sarcastic or cruel.

The heart of the film, and its greatest appeals, reside in scenes built around partially mismatched pairings: Kayla and the sullen, self-absorbed Aiden (Luke Prael); Kayla and Gabe (Jake Ryan), on a “dinner date” in his family’s dining room; Kayla and Kennedy (Cathleen Olivere), the dim, snooty class beauty; Kayla and her high school “shadow,” Olivia (Emily Robinson); Kayla and the high school kid (Daniel Zolghadri) who tries to take advantage of her; Kayla and her mildly flummoxed single dad, Mark (Josh Hamilton).

The seemingly off-handed father-daughter relationship gradually becomes especially important, and the adult characters as well as the high school kids seem prone to insecurities and fragile hopes hauntingly similar to those that beleaguer Kayla and her classmates. One of the sidelong ironies in Burnham’s scenario has to do with Kayla getting invited to Kennedy’s birthday party mainly out of the hopes the latter’s mother (Missy Yager) has for catching the eye of Kayla’s dad.

The one element of the film that’s a little ham-handed has to do with several instances of musical bludgeonry. Burnham makes much of the role played by social media, both as emotional diversion and protective insulation. But the cranked-up volume on the kids’ ear bud music obliterates a point about hysteria and panic that’s made more incisively elsewhere in the film.