Sundance Film Review: 'Eighth Grade' Star, Director on Portraying Ambivalence of the Internet

“This is a good portrayal of what the internet is. It’s not always smiles or obsessing on emojis. It’s its own thing. It’s not bad or good; it’s both,” Fisher said at the Variety Studio presented by AT&T at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Actress Elsie Fisher shines in, like, a totally spot-on, you know, portrait of Millennial angst and stuff, from first-time director Bo Burnham.
Director: Bo Burnham With: , Daniel Zolghadri, Fred Hechinger, Imani Lewis, Luke Prael, Catherine Oliviere.
1 hour 33 minutes

No one likes eighth grade. It’s the compulsory military service of American adolescence, the cod liver oil every child must swallow on her way to adulthood. In the rigged Russian roulette game of human genetics, it’s the bullet in the chamber, that pimple-infested, body-odorous, hair-in-uncomfortable-new-places minimum-security prison every girl must endure, the real-life horror movie to which you can’t close your eyes. Worst of all, the scars that happen here are pretty much guaranteed to haunt you for life.

Welcome to “Eighth Grade,” kids! Whether it’s been two days or two decades since you suffered through it yourself, your heart goes out to Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the young woman we meet tightrope-walking over those shark-infested waters in writer-director Bo Burnham’s remarkable feature debut. If Burnham’s name doesn’t ring a bell, then you most likely belong to the demographic who will see this movie as a cross between last year’s “Lady Bird” (also produced by Scott Rudin) and Larry Clark’s ultra-cautionary “Kids,” identifying with Kayla’s dad (Josh Hamilton, rivaling Michael Stuhlbarg in “Call Me by Your Name” for World’s Greatest Dad) as his daughter narrowly avoids (or not) the landmines upon which you’d gladly throw yourself in her place.

Like a taller and less-tattooed version of Justin Bieber, Burnham began his career on YouTube in late 2006 with an original song called “My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay.” He was 16 at the time, three years older than Kayla’s character, and somehow managed to leverage his viral-video success into a comedy songwriting career, turning his quick-witted insights into piercingly funny, unapologetically irreverent rap songs. Apart from a handful of lo-fi music videos Burnham has made over the years, there was nothing to suggest that he had it in him to direct a film, which makes “Eighth Grade” one of the sweetest surprises of this year’s Sundance.

Bead-braided, 10-rated ’70s sex symbols aside, Bo is a boy’s name, of course, which makes this gender-flipped act of adolescent empathy all the more remarkable. Every year, Sundance is littered with deeply narcissistic, transparently autobiographical coming-of-age stories. As Hollywood lawyer Linda Lichter so aptly put it Peter Biskind’s “Down and Dirty Pictures”: “At Sundance, the bulk of the pictures are about losing your virginity. It’s babies making movies about babies. With some exceptions, the filmmakers don’t really have a voice yet.”

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Burnham is that exception. An accomplished comedian, Burnham has already put in his 10,000 hours, honing what he has to say for nearly a dozen years, and as such, “Eighth Grade” shines as, like, a totally spot-on, you know, portrait of Millennial angst and stuff. That may be how Kayla (and all her peers) talk, punctuating their quasi-articulate ideas with hesitant “ums” and “ahs,” but Burnham shows a sociolinguist’s ear for the cadence and flow of 21st-century girl-speak, and Fisher (who dubbed adorable young Agnes in all three “Despicable Me” movies, but will almost certainly be new to audiences) delivers his dialogue so naturally, you’d swear she’s making it up as she goes along.