The Kids Are Sorta All Right in Two of Sundance’s Best

After two weeks away from home, I’d begun to feel a little homesick for New York, as the Sundance Film Festival wound to a close. So it was nice, and a little aching, to see the city so lovingly captured in Skate Kitchen,Crystal Moselle’s cool, fun tribute to a group of real-life skater teens. The story goes that Moselle spotted two of the girls on the subway, introduced herself as a filmmaker, and asked if there were more girls like them. Indeed there were, all forming a feminist, sex-positive, shred-happy collective called the Skate Kitchen. Some time later, Moselle’s film arrived in Park City, with all the kids playing a version of themselves.

They re-create their real-life bond—funny, encouraging, gregarious—with natural ease, Moselle providing them with a woozy, freewheeling environment to glide around in. It’s such a simple joy watching these girls (and a few guys, including Jaden Smith, one of the two professional actors in the film, the other being Elizabeth Rodriguez) do something they love, supporting one another as they challenge themselves. Street-skating Instagram star Rachelle Vinberg takes the lead here, playing Camille, a Long Island teen whose entrée into the Skate Kitchen world—and her subsequent successes and mistakes within it—make up the plot of this loose narrative film. Vinberg is great, convincingly tackling a range of experience: family drama, sisterly bonding, guarded flirtation. She, like the rest of the cast, somehow has an energy that’s both brash and thoughtful; these are still kids, but they are savvy and wise beyond their years in many ways.

And boy are they hip. While Skate Kitchen is a pleasure to watch, it also made me feel like an old square; how is it possible that these fierce, fashionable kids and I Iive in the same city?? I’ll admit to at first being a little resentful of all this coolness, or maybe more accurately, of my own lack of it. But the wonderful thing about Skate Kitchen is how inviting it is, welcoming you into its community and showing you around with cheery spunk. Skate Kitchen is a warm movie—as a colleague articulated to me last night, it makes you feel nostalgic for a childhood you never had. That’s a testament to how richly realized a sense of place Moselle has captured, showing here, as she did with the documentary The Wolfpack a few years back, how good she is at zeroing in on a specific group or community and assessing them fully, fairly, and on their terms.

As for the teen years you did actually have, and are perhaps less eager to revisit: Bo Burnham’sEighth Grade offers a simultaneously harrowing and sweet look at early adolescence. Burnham insightfully focuses on the youth of the here and now, heavily steeped in smartphone and social-media culture. But Burnham, whose own career as a comedian began on YouTube, isn’t a Luddite scold. Instead, he ambivalently illustrates the realities of the moment, in all their funny mundanity, and their darker, grander implications.

He found a hell of a young actress, Elsie Fisher, to play Kayla, a painfully shy kid at the end of her eighth-grade year; she’s so credible it’s easy to forget she’s in a scripted film. Kayla is awkward and seems mostly friendless, but has an active online life, diligently posting little-watched life-advice vlogs on YouTube and relentlessly scrolling through Instagram. How all this virtual stuff both perverts and informs her experience in the outside world is the film’s most bracing observation. If you have a kid that age (or older, or younger), you might want to throw their phone into the ocean after seeing the film—though Eighth Grade argues by its bittersweet end that despite this nagging culture of follower counts and filtered perfectionism, loneliness is still conquerable, friendship and true connection still possible. It may just take a little time, a little bumpiness. Which has always been true for a certain kind of kid, hasn't it? The mechanisms may have changed (drastically), but perhaps the most primal feelings haven’t.

Burnham stages all of this with a heartening lack of snideness or mockery. Though many of the film’s scenes are apocalyptically uncomfortable and exacting—I watched an exquisitely written and all too relatable pool party scene through my fingers—his goal is not to make us feel or awful, or to punish his characters. Eighth Grade is surprisingly humane, a cringe-fest that affords an abundance of sympathy as it evokes so many sweaty, zitty memories.

Eighth Grade is an exciting directorial debut for Burnham, a precocious teen phenomenon who seems to have grown into a thoughtful adult—one who knows of what he speaks. He’s made an almost alarmingly perceptive film that only rarely goes for the easy joke or verges toward cliché. It may not always be fun revisiting all the horror of yearning, uncertain young adulthood. But Eighth Grade at least does the good work of reminding us that those long ago (or not so long ago) years did actually mean something—that we felt what we felt, and learned, hopefully, what we learned.

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Richard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.

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