Movies about the lives of adolescents.

A few weeks ago I panned the movie Easy A as a teen drag performance and a bad one at that.

Using teens and teen scenarios to tell adult stories is not inherently a bad thing. Allegories like the movies Election, Mean Girls and Rushmore are rich with meaning despite treating adolescence as a pretext rather than a dramatic purpose.

But these rare successes may come at the expense of movies that actually and accurately depict the lives of teens. Such movies don’t disregard the feelings and struggles of adolescents as immature or shallow – i.e., as something you “get over” like a cold or a sprained ankle – but rather as pivotal moments in a person’s life; the stuff of drama.

Below is a short list of such achievements. Not all of these movies are equally good and a few have some real problems but they are all focused on what life can mean to teens:

I have excluded some “canonical teen movies” (e.g., by John Hughes, Cameron Crowe) from this list on what is a perhaps a technicality: while they are clearly movies for teens, they strike me as movies about overcoming adolescence rather than muddling through it. They are fantasies rather than dramas. It’s a distinction that surely says more about my taste for narrative than any shortcomings in these movies.

Update: Fish Tank would now be at the top of this list.