In Hulu’s “PEN15,” Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, who are best friends and the show’s co-creators (with Sam Zvibleman), play versions of themselves at thirteen, entering seventh grade, in 2000, delusionally convinced that this will be “the best year ever.” To look authentically adolescent, the actresses, who are both around thirty, go full “21 Jump Street”: they bind their breasts, wear braces, and adopt the halter-topped, cargo-panted fashion of the late nineteen-nineties. All the other kids—the protagonists’ crushes, their geeky buds, their rich-girl nemeses—are played by real teens.

It’s a risky tactic, one that could easily feel gimmicky or unconvincing. (Or queasy, considering that the boys they crush out on and, in some cases, make out with are actually prepubescent—an issue the show skirts with trick camerawork.) In early episodes, “PEN15” can feel abrasive, swinging from cruelty to uplift, real to surreal, in a way that takes some getting used to. It’s funny, but with a cringe-humor jolt, and, if you’ve seen (or lived) certain narratives about nerdy outsiders, there will be story beats that are familiar, including an online Cyrano arc that doesn’t quite land.

Yet the performances deliver, completely. Their oddball verve, the clammy intimacy between the performers and the material—the creators’ sheer commitment to the bit—pays off, and not merely with Y2K-era realism, down to the AOL creaky-doorway sounds, but emotionally, by giving every humiliating moment a double edge. Erskine and Konkle play their roles straight, with such earnestness that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t actually thirteen. Yet, when they’re hurt, we feel it as both a trauma and a cathartic memory. Extremely weird comparison, I know, but I was reminded of the documentary “The Act of Killing,” in which Indonesian gangsters act out crimes they committed years before. Nothing nearly so weighty is involved here, but the show’s best sequences capture the awkward theatricality of certain moments in adult life, when you are bleakly aware of how much you are performing yourself.

“You’re my actual rainbow gel pen in a sea of blue-and-black writing utensils,” Anna reassures Maya, after a brutal first day of classes, during which Maya gets labelled “UGIS,” or “Ugliest Girl in School.” When the school year starts, they’re so close that they’re practically one person, somewhere on the continuum from “Broad City” to “My Brilliant Friend,” with a little “Heavenly Creatures” thrown in. Alone together, they roll around like puppies, grooming each other and acting as each other’s hype man. They even play with dolls, staging tiny soap operas. As far as they’re concerned, no adventure—a kiss, a drug—counts unless it’s shared, both a dare and a promise. “I’ll do it if you do it,” Maya says. “I’ll do it if you do it,” Anna replies.

Konkle is endearingly vulnerable as Anna, a sunny string bean with a brace-faced grin. She’s especially good in quiet scenes with her parents, forced to be the spectator to their crumbling marriage, a situation that is somehow worse when the two are “getting along,” making out like overcompensating teens themselves.

But it’s Erskine who gives the show its kick. Her Maya is a true-blue alienated weirdo, seething with contradictions. She’s a horny tomboy with a bowl cut, both worshipful and contemptuous of the popular girls. She’s a showoff desperate to disappear, a bullied kid who calls other kids sluts. She galumphs past the school lockers, punching people in the shoulder to be friendly. At one point, she’s so tense that her hands turn into claws. (A condition Erskine really has, called carpopedal spasms.)

Yet Maya is also bizarrely charismatic—you can see why her friend Sam has a crush on her, because there’s something punk in her self-assertion, even at its most masochistic. A devoted “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” fan, she does a Jim Carrey impression that both kills and confuses her classmates. Her sexuality is just as imitative: she’s entranced by the porny femininity around her, so that the minute she pulls on a stolen pink thong she starts gyrating in the mirror, purring, “Damn, white lady.” (Maya has a Japanese mom and a white American dad.)

The best episodes tend to center on Maya’s explosive urges. Unable to handle a simple drum solo, she goes into a wild improvisational tear, then vomits. After Anna chugs a beer, she ups the ante by huffing keyboard cleaner. In a particularly daring episode, Maya discovers masturbation, and gets so overwhelmed that she can’t stop touching herself, grinding away in a school-bathroom stall, as Anna, clueless, chats about tickets to a B*Witched concert.

That’s a sequence the show would be far less likely to try with a thirteen-year-old actress. Erskine’s performance reminded me of a tradition of funny women channelling their grossest, most naïve younger selves. There was Gilda Radner doing “The Judy Miller Show,” on “Saturday Night Live,” slamming against her bedroom walls while shrieking, “No, we have to run to England! We have to run to France!” There was Molly Shannon’s armpit-sniffing Mary Katherine Gallagher, also on “Saturday Night Live,” and Michaela Coel’s horndog virgin, in “Chewing Gum”—an older character, but one who shares Maya’s sense of pink lip gloss as a Schedule II substance. “PEN15” ’s creators have talked about their love for the filmmaker Todd Solondz, whose Dawn (Wiener-Dog) Wiener was clearly a muse. But Maya also feels like a sister to the heroine of the movie “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” another darkly funny confession by an angry proto-artist, who we know will get her revenge by being the one to tell the story.

In the sixth episode, Maya and Anna wind up filming a Spice Girls’ parody—part of a fake P.S.A. for a school project—with the manipulative girls who rule the school (a set of characters who, in one of the show’s weaknesses, are too cartoonish to feel original). Although Maya is desperate to play Posh Spice, the clique insists that she be the “ethnic” Spice, Scary. They make Maya act out the “servant” role in the spot, too, maintaining that these choices are somehow more logical, and funnier.

Later, Maya’s older brother tells her that she’s being self-hating and racist; meanwhile, Anna melts down with white guilt, embarking on a misguided hunger strike. There are a few lumps to that plot, as well. But what makes the sequence indelible is how Maya responds, which is by going along with the popular girls’ joke, muttering, “Yeah, yeah, that’s funny.” She amps up her accent, as “Guido the Mexican Gardener”; she tries to make it all O.K. by owning the bit. The story becomes a smart exploration of Maya’s guilt, and of her distress in the aftermath, as she tries to figure out where to aim her fury (at herself? at Anna?), and who she is, who her people are. It works because it doesn’t simplify; it lets ugly stuff stay unresolved.

“PEN15” is one of several ambitious current teen shows, among them Netflix’s animated “Big Mouth,” which has its own compulsively masturbating nerd girl, Missy. The Valentine’s Day episode was a beautifully raunchy homage to “When Harry Met Sally.” There’s also the British show “Sex Education,” a sleeker, more contrived sex comedy with one standout plot, about a gay black boy transcending the role of sassy bestie. As Sonia Saraiya pointed out, in Vanity Fair, these shows offer teen viewers stealth sex ed that’s far more detailed and joyful than anything American kids are likely to receive in health class.

Watching “PEN15,” however, I kept thinking back to a neglected TV classic: “Strangers with Candy,” starring Amy Sedaris, as Jerri Blank, a middle-aged junkie and ex-con who reënrolls in high school. That show was a caustic satire on after-school specials, a release valve for Gen X cynicism about network TV. But, if it’s from a different generation of comedy, it shares with “PEN15” the insight that, creatively speaking, letting your freak flag fly is one path to liberation. Or, in the wise words of Jerri Blank, “If you’re going to reach for a star, reach for the lowest one you can.” ♦