https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cringey-teen-spirit-of-eighth-grade

In a recent interview with Rookie, Elsie Fisher noted that, before getting the role of Kayla, she had stopped acting for a while, because she was “a teen-ager with a lot of acne and roles for teen-agers are disingenuous a lot of the time, and if they want to hire an actor to play a teen-ager, they’re not gonna hire a teen-ager with a lot of acne.” “Eighth Grade” revels in the rough, pimply particularities of middle school: the too-large backpacks on still-developing, still-childlike bodies; the unpracticed rituals of grooming; the bulges of baby fat rising above a tight waistband; the panic of early sexual interactions; the painful but necessary separation from your suddenly extremely embarrassing parents. But the movie also portrays, more broadly, the essential contradiction within the language of individual self-affirmation that surrounds us at fourteen or at forty. In order for “everything to work out,” one needs not just to be oneself but to be one’s best self. This requires constant work and upkeep, which must be privately pursued and publicly disavowed.

In his review, my colleague Richard Brody suggested that, unlike Greta Gerwig’s recent “Lady Bird,” whose teen protagonist has a “vigorous and complicated cultural life,” Kayla in “Eighth Grade” is something of a thin character, as the movie fails to give her substance or curiosity or interests. This is true enough. Kayla is ordinary, basic—not especially aspirational or cultured. She listens to Top Forty-style music, wears mall garb, is not much of a reader or an artist. Like the rest of the kids in her class, she doesn’t seem to care about the political implications of the drill they are all made to sit through. But her lack of defining characteristics that might suggest a future artistic trajectory, is, I think, part of the movie’s point. For all her relative blankness, Kayla is emotionally sensitive, and the intricacies and pressures of the social world to which she silently bears witness affect her deeply. These are her interests and her passions, as limited and reduced as they are, and this rings true.