That first Hailee Steinfeld explosion!—telling her teacher Woody Harrelson that she's going to kill herself and she at least wants him to know about it, unleashing her character's signature marathon of words, spilling neatly upon the next syllable's heels, lurching back and forth between comic absurdity and dark seriousness—this is the miracle of tone-juggling and committed acting that we need in movies today.

The orderly, tinker-toy precision of Kelly Fremon Craig's interiors allows for characters to rise from the ether, spontaneously and organically. It's all due to the plethora of derelict details: Nadine's mom's hand thumps on a car to the beat of the score. Mom's panties ride up as she's trying to get 7-year-old Nadine out of the car, and a local PTA dad and her son both gawk and look. The moment could have been shuttled in from a Richard Lester comedy, and, indeed, there's a half-Lester rhythm to Craig's crisp, neat ordering of shots—lots of cutting in-and-out of the scene, but always to maintain the crucial babbling-brook flow of this supercharged Bildungsroman. You're never aware of the cuts, but the story leaps forward with a hushed-up urgency regardless.

Like Billy Wilder or Elaine May, Kelly Fremon Craig is showing a lot even if it seems like the story simply rolls forward without a guiding auteur's hand. Nothing gratuitous to signify some malevolent lurking neuroses, no pulling of Gimp strings to inject some psycho razzmatazz into the scene. And yet, psychological disrepair is oh-so-present. All we need is a shot of Hailee, splayed languidly on a brown couch, the negative space of her white wall hanging ominously above her about to swallow her up, an immovable and uncaring wooden staircase ascending to Big Bro's pad upstairs (where he has sex with her best friend), mocking Hailee's inability to go upstairs lest she engage the best friend in some painful "how-could-you" death-glare showdown, the kitchen-nook on screen left which is hauntingly empty of the jaded mother (an untyped character, too--both cold and deeply empathetic), as Futurama blares offscreen, showing for a person who doesn't laugh at its smart humor because she is unable to turn on her "escapist" switch, her life right now cannot handle la-di-da or ho-hum escapism—

THIS IS WHAT PAINTING IN CINEMA IS ALL ABOUT! The shot lasts for five seconds, but what a world is conjured in such a short amount of time. All dependent upon the narrative, yes, but look at how neatly and calmly and naturalistically Kelly Fremon Craig renders the interiority of this edge-of-seven teen.

There's real darkness and pain in Craig's wistful conjuring-up of millennial, youthful angst. In the Craig world, girls don't just tease Nadine, they curb-stomp the head of her soul: "Nobody likes you. You suck and you're going to get AIDS." A rough-edged toughness surrounds familiar kitsch-images of girls playing inside forts as dad looks wistfully on in approval: he will soon die of a heart-attack while eating fast-food and listening to Billy Joel (not as funny as that description sounds), and they talk about the darkest secrets that their parents keep (never as dark as they think it is). Later, when she's a high-schooler, drunk and vomiting in a bathroom sink, she tells herself that she'll "hate having to spend the rest of my life with myself." All of these moments are comically tragic, never cloying, and, as in Wilder and May, only serve to bolster the character's complex resolve, and their inability to make smart, rational decisions—either due to peer pressure, depression, inexperience, or any of the other hundred-thousand aggressions that slap the teen's face today.

If every movie ensemble for the next five years was as perfectly in-sync, in-tune, and engaged as the Edge of Seventeen players, we could consider the cinema vs. TV wars won. The Asian teen with the hopeless crush (a sometimes-cartooned, but mostly unflashy Hayden Szeto) nails the mumble-mouthed awkwardness that flows beneath his pretty smooth surface pretense of togetherness. He's alright, normal, telling his crush that he went golfing over the weekend ("mini-golfing!" he says, he says in a subtle and well-pulled-off ad lib that hides the fact that he's rich and that he ACTUALLY went golfing), and everything's mostly daisies—until he mimics mini-golfing with a nearby pencil, makes a Star Wars laser noise, drops his pencil, stretches his eyes, mumbles "I dunno why I did that," reaches for it, and immediately goes into asking her out ("We should go out sometime!") mid-reach-for-the-pencil. She says yes—but maybe some other time. O. the relief! O, the awkwardness! O, the cringe! O, the failure! In these moments, we are both him and her--part of Craig's gelatinous sense of character identification with anyone who breathes and speaks lines. We are everybody at various points. We may empathize with one person on the surface (me with Mr. Szeto), feel psychologically connected with another (me with Ms. Steinfeld), and actually be a completely different person (me and Mr. Nice-Guy Jenner). It's all part of Craig's warmly humanist embrace of people. She knows that we can be impossible to deal with, but demands we be dealt with regardless. Craig' s people refuse to assuage or to make us feel comfortable. Her hatred of stereotypes makes palpable the awkwardness of a passionate need to make love to the person you can never fully love or ever be with, or the death of a loved one leaving you with another person who can never quite fill the void left by the deceased. When Hailee harshly berates her reflection in the mirror of a party bathroom ("Why are you ACTING so weird, so awkward? Just have a good time!"), she speaks for all of us who have never found their footing in grind-bump-grind parties, and who start blaming something deep within themselves for their inability to be imperfectly human. This isn't a "everyone is a star!" kind of mentality, it's an "everybody is fucked up and let's recognize this" kind of approach. Emphasis on the "fucked up."

The heart of this film is obviously Hailee Steinfeld, but why? One could answer by citing her wonderfully fresh facial expression. Stretching seventeen different emotions in seconds, Steinfeld's current of emotion has no dam, and neither would she build one. Another answer lies with her character's non-declamatory weirdnesses, her derelict character gestures: When Nadine comes home, she wants to eat some fruit. But rather than taking grapes out of the fruit bowl, she picks up the bowl itself and starts plucking them, one by one, from their stem. It doesn't solve world hunger, but damn! what a powerful, non-intuitive gesture this is! what a radical recognition of a girl's uniqueness! Here, Steinfeld joins Shelley Duvall's countless idiosyncrasies in Altman's 3 Women. Like Duvall's yellow dress caught in the side of the 70s car door, Steinfeld has a lot of tricks up her sleeve, like when she sports a Chaplinesque stumble as she fumbles down to admonish her jock-brother Darian (Blake Jenner, who is here allowed to play a character and not an Everybody Wants Some!! type), and she becomes one with the wall--so desperate, so lonely, so darkly funny.

The choppy, internal, accurate, constantly-changing and constantly-reoriented flow of her mini-monologues (when complimenting Erwin: "You remind me of an old man...very wise....convalescent...in a wheelchair") is another one of Steinfeld's tricks: the direction of a sentence is never pre-determined, so there's a fascinating feeling of a real person who is playing life by ear. (This only works in acting and conversations with friends, of course, not when you're the President-Elect of the United States.) When she stands in a John Hughes hallway (filled with green lockers on either side of the kidless walkway), the stakes seem much bigger than Hughes' kitschy odes to white teenhood, mainly because Craig has a recognition of a hard-to-pin-down outer world, because Craig's direction asks Steinfeld to dominate any space she's in with her flowing brown locks, defiantly odd-angled posture, and boss pumped-up kicks. We can see who she is, both on her own terms and in terms of other people around her. The irreconcilalble rift between her and her big-brother is one that comes down to their choice of drink: he, with his kale smoothies ("What did I do to make such a perfect kid?" the mom astonishingly asks, and the brother even-more-astonishingly accepts with mock humbleness), and her, a Slurpee enthusiast who mixes vodka-orangesoda-Coke. She's a rambling, meandering, Altman's kid--impossible to not love in a movie context, but difficult to handle in an outside-world context.

We love Hailee Steinfeld's Nadine because she doesn't seem to know what she wants—and she's ragged on for this indecision—but we just want to go in and hug her and tell her, it's gon be alright. An eerie moment inside a pet-store has her talking with an aloof guy named Nick, who she's secretly crushing on, and who may or may not care that she exists. When he flashes a typical "hot-guy" toothy grin to her, we don't melt at him—we melt with her, as the camera centers her, Wes Anderson style, inside the fort of darkly-lit fish tanks. You know that movie-ish feeling when a cute girl or guy talks to you? That's what Craig and Steinfeld momentarily channel—and the moment disappears, as quick as it came, and we start over again with a new scene, wondering "What's God got in store for Nadine this time?" Later, when she's in the car with Nick (because of a faulty text she sends accidentally, he thinks she wants to have sex with him—because that's what she texted—even though it wasn't like that, she just wanted to get her feelings out and accidentally sent the text anyway—but then he texted back saying he wants to go out—so what's a person to do? say NO?), it's just about the most heartbreaking scene of teen sex shot in coming-of-age cinema. She feels uncomfortable and immediately stops it. Then she leans in, afraid and panicked, and starts kissing him again sensuously. Then he tries to shove his hand in between her legs, and she immediately stops it. This push-pull doesn't depict a girl who doesn't know how to say yes or not. This push-pull is more complex: she knows what she wants—a deep human connection with someone, that may be found in sex or talking or laughing or talking a stroll in the park, but a connection!—and she doesn't know how to get it. Who does? It just happens, they tell us. Bullshit, we're tempted to respond back, there's some sort of method. In that moment, we are all Nadine, as hoary as that sounds, fumbling to find something, and hating ourselves when our natural indecision is ingloriously reflected back to us in the form of someone's explosive reaction. (Nick's eyes read: "This bitch is just a tease." Oh, if he only knew what we, the audience, know...). Such insights wouldn't work if the film didn't have a strong soundtrack ("Big Jet Plane" by Angus and Julie Stone) or a stripped-down visualist (Craig's immediate, intimate plain americans) to back up its observations.

Nadine is surprisingly complex. Nadine is both someone you are exasperated with and someone whose shoulder you need to cry upon. Nadine is a McCabe loner--both insufferably stubborn and romantically defiant. Nadine is an old soul--out of the times, yet wise beyond her years. (No wonder Hailee Steinfeld delives, along with Isabelle Huppert in Elle, the year's best performance.) Nadine is clueless with technology, and yet enmeshed in it. She (and her mother) (and brother Blake Jenner) can't send text messages to each other, because the instant-message-text or Tweet is so limiting in its scope, so definitive, so pathetically pithy that it's like anathema for people (like her, like me) who need reams and reams of papers-space-laptops to express their gnawing feelings about their world. How do we get by in this text-happy day and age? Nadine hates that her generation can't communicate without a surplus of emojis, and that everyone in that generation seems to think the whole world needs to know where they went, what they ate, how many people they smoked with, and what they're doing in bed--at all hours of the day. The constant vomit-up of info becomes nauseating and claustrophobic. In that respect, I am her. And yet, without the wisened years of later to tell her everything will be all right. Will it? Are we not who we are formed in youth? Child is father to the man—no one understands this better than Kelly Fremon Craig, whose Elaine May spirit compels her to create something truly breathtaking in its termitic humbleness and insight into life.

P.S. And what a score! Listen to it, today, if you can. (Except that stupid gimmicked Dickhead Song--funny in the context of the film, why would I listen to it outside the theater?) Such accuracy and good-taste to the millennial generation, no posturing or upward-nose-turning or haughty condescension is to be found in any of Craig's punchy one-liners or smooth-flow images.