Ever since James Dean, teenagers have been shown at odds with their elders. But in today’s coming-of-age films, it’s the kids who must rescue their future from adults

Kayla Day does not drink or smoke. She doesn’t talk back to her teachers. The time the 13-year-old at the centre of the new film Eighth Grade – played by Elsie Fisher – spends outside lessons is wholesomely productive. She makes upbeat YouTube videos about how crucial it is to be your most authentic self. (“Being yourself can be hard, and it’s like, aren’t I always being myself?” she asks). But Day is also isolated, menaced by self-doubt and subject to panic attacks. As such, she is the perfect modern teenage heroine: the terrified voice of Generation Z.

Among the movie’s early fans was Molly Ringwald, star of The Breakfast Club. “The best film about adolescence I’ve seen in long time,” she tweeted after a screening. “Maybe ever.” It was a plum endorsement, a passing of the torch from a state-of-the-generation classic that had itself called back to the spiritual starting point of Rebel Without a Cause. The miracle of Eighth Grade is reflecting the depression and anxiety of its subjects while also being funny and charming. It had to change the rules of the coming-of-age movie to do it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The film was made by Bo Burnham, a gifted first-time director, lauded comedian and YouTuber. If you wanted to represent the teenager of 2019, social media is an obvious but useful place to start – this being the first generation to pass through childhood with a smartphone. The predictable storyline would be an exposé of cyberbullying or a nightmarish slipping down internet rabbit holes. But Burnham has a more subtle tale to tell. If the glittering pitch for life online was that anyone could write or play or simply be anything in front of a watching world, the catch eventually became evident – that the world would be watching cat videos instead. (Kayla calls her latest vlog, Putting Yourself Out There, even as the view count for the others stalls at 1, 2 or 0.) The result is a kind of radical loneliness-in-a-crowd that teen movies have never before had to deal with.

Social media also short circuits their neat binary logic: olds on one side, pesky kids the other. Now, technology has united generations. Research suggests dependence on connected devices is a common thread in age groups from pre-teens on TikTok to elderly racists on Facebook. It also endlessly sub-divides us. In Eighth Grade, Kayla encounters a group of high school seniors, aghast at the fact that she had Snapchat at nine.

But if 13-year-olds regard 16-year-olds as grown-up, they see 26-year-olds as antique. The real-life gulf between cohorts is vast. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the young were shut out of the housing market and forced to live with their parents; the young that followed have parents hobbled by the crash. Rates of depression among Generation Z teenagers have been found to be two-thirds higher than among millennials at the same age.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) and Evie (Nikki Reed) in Thirteen. Photograph: Universal Pictures

No surprise then that millennial coming-of-age movies – Juno, say, or Scott Pilgrim vs the World – feel like loud relics of a distant era. The last time a 13-year-old girl was the subject of a high-profile US film, it was Thirteen, directed by Catherine Hardwicke in 2003. Evan Rachel Wood was cast as delinquent Tracy, whose anger at her mother played out in sexualised behaviour and huffing cans of gas duster. The film left many critics shaken (“Chilling,” whispered the Hollywood Reporter). In fact, even then it felt strangely old-fangled, a variation on a theme unchanged since James Dean.

Now, another new coming-of-age film turns the clock back again – Jonah Hill making his first movie as a director with Mid90s, set in the decade of the title. Nostalgia hangs thick. Hill spent a chunk of his youth hanging out at the Los Angeles skateboard shop Hot Rod, his experience filtered into the story of a troubled 13-year-old among a wolfpack of skaters. Fans of the Harmony Korine-scripted Kids will have their memories liberally jogged. While the adolescent sex that made that film such a hot potato in 1995 is given a gentler spin, Hill still goes big on underage drink and drugs, the traditional basics for intergenerational moral panic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mid90s, directed by Jonah Hill. Photograph: Altitude Films

To set the film in 2019 would feel ridiculous, and not just because we’ve seen it all before. Real teenage life has transformed. Recent research that found British young people disclosing mental health issues on an industrial scale also reported dwindling use of drugs and alcohol. (Self-harm is skyrocketing). If such a staple of teen drama is now old hat, the question it asked is redundant, too. What is it that makes these kids so messed up? Do we really need to ask?

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Every London teen has to navigate streets where other teens are stabbed to death. In the US, school shootings have become routine. Last year, 113 people were killed or injured in school shootings in the US. Unsurprisingly, American teens have reported fear of gun violence as a primary cause of anxiety. In the course of Eighth Grade, Kayla and her classmates carry out an “active shooter drill”. Kids being kids, they slump bored against the nearest wall, the victims freckled with fake blood.

Step back further and the problem is bigger even than guns. While postwar children grew up fearful of possible nuclear war, every 13-year-old now has to wrestle with climate change. Last summer in Stockholm, another quiet teenager lost patience with the adult world. “I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything,” Greta Thunberg told the Guardian recently. Yet suddenly, she did. Taking a cue from the US students who walked out of lessons after Parkland to call for tighter gun laws, Thunberg – then 15 – began weekly school strikes outside the Swedish parliament in protest at government inertia over climate change. Other strikers, such 13-year-old Scot Holly Gillibrand, were inspired in turn. Eventually, around 1.4 million young people worldwide left their classrooms this month to demand action on climate.

Even before Eighth Grade, a different kind of youth has been showing up on screen. Chiewetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind told the story of the Malawian teenager William Kamkwamba whose self-taught engineering projects rescued his village from famine. In The Kid Who Would Be King, director Joe Cornish charged a suburban 12-year-old with dragging Britain back from the brink of destruction. If young people are going to have to fix the world, the coming-of-age film will need to keep pace.

In the era of Rebel Without a Cause, an older audience would be nervous and mystified. Now, the fear runs only one way. Teenagers are scared of adults: how we vote, buy, drive, fly. Reading the research on their mental health, Generation Z can feel heartbreakingly remote. Watching Day in Eighth Grade – stumbling red-faced, nursing crushes, looking forward – you realise she is exactly like the rest of us. Then your heart breaks again.