Film

The Edge of Seventeen

Name: The Edge of Seventeen
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Released: 2016
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Woody Harrelson, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, Kyra Sedgwick

Nadine Franklin is a raw nerve given legs and a mouth: bitter, funny, hopelessly self-sabotaging after her father's death and her best friend's defection to her brother. Hailee Steinfeld makes cruelty and vulnerability feel like the same muscle. It's a teen movie with real grief underneath the one-liners — for anyone who likes their coming-of-age stories caustic rather than cute.

TMDb rating

7.1

If you liked this

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Same acid wit, same impossible mother-daughter friction, same sense that being a teenage girl is a low-grade emergency. Saoirse Ronan is every bit Nadine's equal in prickly, lovable difficulty.

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Bo Burnham gets so far inside teenage anxiety it's almost uncomfortable to watch. If Nadine's inner monologue were externalized and one year younger, this is what it would look like.

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The friendship-under-strain energy and the fast, filthy, heartfelt dialogue are close cousins. It's a warmer film, but the two leads argue with the same devastating precision Nadine deploys.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Welcome to the Dollhouse1996

Same unlikeable-but-true teenage-girl anger and social exile as Nadine, pushed to a punishing, unresolved extreme instead of a redemptive arc.

Todd Solondz's queasy, unsparing 90s classic follows an unloved, unlikeable-on-purpose middle schooler through genuine social torment, no safety net, no easy laughs.

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Emma Stone narrates her own social catastrophe with the same rapid, self-aware sarcasm Nadine uses as armor. Both films know that being smart doesn't save you from being humiliated.

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Juno2007

An offbeat, quick-tongued teenage girl narrates her way through a crisis that's genuinely hers to deal with, not a lesson for adults. The voice is the whole appeal, same as here.

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10 Things I Hate About You1999

A sharp-tongued girl, a meddling sibling dynamic, and comedy that doesn't sand down the heroine's edges. It's the genre's classic template, done with real charm.

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Say Anything...1989no page yet

An earlier, gentler ancestor: teenage longing played completely straight, without irony, and trusted to be as important as any adult drama. Good companion piece for the sincerity underneath Nadine's sarcasm.

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The genre touchstone for quotable teenage cruelty and social warfare. If you want the joke density turned all the way up after Nadine's dry delivery, this delivers it.

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Same interior, confessional teenage voice and messy family dynamics, but stretched across a season instead of compressed into two hours — the format lets the ache breathe.

The show that basically invented the modern prestige teen drama — Angela Chase's diary-voice narration and fraught family life gave this whole genre its blueprint.

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Same volcanic teenage-girl anger and suffocating parental friction, just reimagined as family-friendly fantasy instead of ground-level realism.

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