The Edge of Seventeen (12A, 104 mins, ★★★)
Hailee Steinfeld made a huge impression back in 2010 when she made her big-screen debut in the Coen brothers’ True Grit at the age of just 14. She played a tough-talking farm girl, giving a performance that proved more than a match for Jeff Bridges’s turn as a grizzled cowboy. Six years on, Steinfeld is playing another spiky teenager, but this time the setting is an American high school, rather than the Wild West.
Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig has lofty ambitions for her teen movie. As far as the comedy goes, she is clearly aspiring to the standard set by 1980s maestro John Hughes (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; The Breakfast Club; etc). The film doesn’t quite make that grade, but at its best it’s very funny indeed, particularly in the exchanges between Steinfeld’s Nadine and Woody Harrelson’s teacher Mr Bruner, who takes what we might call an uncompromising approach to dealing with the adolescent angst that gets chucked his way.
