10 Unforgettable Films About Troubled Adolescents

When Nicholas Ray released Rebel Without A Cause in 1955, it finally gave teenagers a voice on-screen that they could relate to. It wasn’t that all high schoolers were in trouble with the law like James Dean’s Jim Stark, but even the most well-behaved and academically-driven teenagers saw a bit of their angers and angst in Stark and his classmates.

The following films about troubled adolescents have plenty in common with Rebel Without A Cause, their makers influenced by the rebellious youth depicted in Ray’s 1955 classic and a fervent unwillingness to simply accept the status quo.

Over The Edge

Dir. Jonathan Kaplan (1979)

Over The Edge inspired Nirvana’s seminal classic Smells Like Teen Spirit, which says a lot about the film’s POV on teenage angst, apathy and, ultimately, boredom. It tells the story of the young people of New Granada, a planned community in Denver, Colorado which, in its idealistic middle class ambition, has forgotten about its young people.

This has led to teenagers finding their own amusement taking drugs, drinking alcohol, and listening to rock music. When the only place to unwind in town is threatened with closure, the kids rise up against the adults who fail to understand them. The film, co-written by River’s Edge director Tim Hunter, features an oppressive void, a fiery adolescent anger, a sense of alienation, from which emerges an incendiary teenage rebellion.

World’s Greatest Dad

Dir. Bobcat Goldthwait (2009)

Few films compare with writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark concept; think a hedonistic rave at a burial site while a loved one is lowered into the ground. It sees Robin Williams’ well-meaning schoolteacher and frustrated unpublished writer struggling to build a harmonious relationship his socially bankrupt, sexually frustrated and porn-addicted son.

It doesn’t help that offspring Kyle (Daryl Sabara) is also horribly obnoxious to all he comes in contact with including his Dad. When Kyle asphyxiates himself to death while masturbating to pictures he’s taken of his Dad’s girlfriend, Lance quickly fashions a suicide note to hide the embarrassment and rearranges the body to hang from the closet rail before calling the emergency services.

Unexpectedly, the suicide note becomes a public sensation. After being published in the school newspaper, all the kids who hated Kyle suddenly see him as a lost and tragic soul whose death was a brave way to free himself of the troubles weighing on the minds of many teenagers.

As suggested by the title, the film is more about the parent at the storm created as a result of their troubled child’s indiscretions, its pitch black tone akin to Lynne Ramsay’s equally grim We Need To Talk About Kevin. Where they differ is in World’s Greatest Dad’s humour which finds hilarity amongst life’s most bleakest moments.

It’s a brilliantly observed and intelligently conceived critique of the myth’s we willingly create out of a necessity to make sense of life and death. Under Goldthwait’s direction, we muse on the construction of untruths and the opportunism to exploit them for personal gain.

Bully

Dir. Larry Clark

Never one to shy away from controversy, Larry Clark delivers a brutally matter-of-fact retelling of the real life murder of Bobby Kent in 2001’s Bully. In 1993, seven friends plotted and carried out the murder of Kent, a man they despised for his emotional and physical abuse towards them. Kent was widely considered an upstanding, career-driven and polite citizen by his parents and other adults, while those young people who knew him in the neighbourhood, particularly his so-called best friend Marty Puccio, thought very differently.

Led by strong performances from Stahl, Renfro and Milner, Clark seems just as interested in the group’s hedonistic excess as he is their plot to murder Kent. Indeed, it is this indefinable line between pleasure and pain, where the boundaries are muddied in a haze of drugs and alcohol that leads to the group’s devastating act. Plotting to kill like a bunch of underage drinkers concocting a house party while their parents are holidaying in the Bahamas, Bully is a straightforward, unblemished depiction of boredom, adolescence and experimentation. Clark’s bland, naturalistic colour scheme echoes a bleary-eyed outlook on life, while his voyeuristic camera turns every vacant gaze into a sweaty search for the next sexually gratifying release.

Like their antics in the bedroom, the murder comes as a form of catharsis. A physical release for Marty from the bully, a figurative release for the others similar to the hallucinogenic trip experienced through many mind-altering drugs. Perhaps what is most distressing in the murder is the sense that adolescence is finding its way in the world when the boundaries of right and wrong have broken irreparably. The distance these “kids” feel from their parents hints at an unworkable family structure, where domesticity is forcing young minds to retreat into a world governed by new rules.

Heathers

Dir. Michael Lehmann (1989)

There’s no question Michael Lehmann’s Heathers still resonates amongst audiences 30 years on from its original release. Defiantly dark, Lehmann’s pitch black comedy sees Christian Slater lead Winona Ryder away from the “Heathers”, a popular clique known by their mutual name. As the pair plot a rebellion against the popular kids, their pranks to turn the tables become increasingly twisted. The film, released in 1989, is a wonderfully dark look at high school politics, oppression and the battle for acceptance and popularity.

It’s a film that ultimately retaliates against the monopoly John Hughes had on the teen/high school genre. As director Lehmann says in an interview with The Guardian, he likes Hughes’ films but he and Heathers’ writer Daniel Waters “didn’t think they really represented the truly cruel nature of interpersonal behaviour in high school.” Adds Lehmann: “We didn’t think things were as fun as everybody else did.”

Suburbia

Dir. Penelope Spheeris (1984)

Described by Vincent Canby as “probably the best teenagers-in-revolt movie since Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge”, Penelope Spheeris’ film, which she writes and directs, finds adolescent runaways squatting in abandoned tract housing developments. Funny and violent, Suburbia’s authenticity is cultivated from a tangible sense of anger and alienation.

An empathy towards youthful delinquency cuts through the critical eye of adults who only see unruly, immoral and troublesome teenagers out of control, Spheeris reveals a sincerity born of the anger that still lingers within her.

Ratcatcher

Dir. Lynne Ramsay (1999)

Ratcacher is a bleak, troubling depiction of a Glaswegian pre-teen in the early 1970s. Following the death of a boy whose fatal drowning he unwittingly caused, James lives out his days dreaming of escaping a drab council flat existence for a new public-funded development away from the claustrophobic inner-city concrete jungle he’s grown up in.

Lynne Ramsay’s film, which prefers minimalist plotting and suggestive images, enjoys an almost silent film aesthetic which proves hugely immersive as our attention centres on a child of few words. Ratcatcher’s focus on a young boy’s difficult life in slum-like surroundings is framed by a public sector strike which sees bin bags and waste lining the streets. Ramsay is ruthless in her approach, her hints of optimism blunted by subtle, provocative diversions into fantasy. She serves a moving and unsettling montage of adolescence that suggests childhood innocence is not necessarily lost to circumstance if it doesn’t exist in the first place.

River’s Edge

Dir. Tim Hunter (1986)

What makes River’s Edge so powerful is the depiction of an apathetic youth unmoved by the sight of a dead girl. Their reactions are varied but collectively dulled; the killer’s trophy nothing more than a prop interrupting their boredom.

Apathy can be a corrosive part of human nature. Especially when applied to children and teenagers searching not just for fun, but for purpose in their lives. Take away their sense of hope and ambition in an environment where the conventional family unit might be disrupted, the American Dream nothing but a bit of make-believe, and life can degenerate into an emotionless blur delineated only by the rise and fall of the day’s sun.

This caustic backdrop to 1980s and 1990s youth culture prompted a conservative American media to unleash a damning forecast for worse to come. A broken generation. Tim Hunter’s film provides us with a haunting image that suggests this generational monster is becoming cyclical. Alcohol and drug taking are rampant, but they seem like a cathartic response to the pain that’s already there. Pain that’s been numbed to such a degree that rape and murder don’t register fear, regret or even sadness.

If

Dir. Lindsay Anderson (1968)

Malcolm McDowell’s counter-culture, non-conformist character in Lindsay Anderson’s provocative If brought him to the attention of Stanley Kubrick who then cast him in A Clockwork Orange. That speaks for itself. Anderson, the harbinger of Free Cinema, a pivotal and influential period for British cinema in the 1960s, satirises public school life in If, the director taking an unapologetic swipe at the British public school system and its clampdown on individualism. This conceit is the backdrop to the film’s devastating conclusion that reveals student’s revolting in the most destructive way.

Originally titled “Crusaders” in David Sherwin’s screenplay, the story drew heavily from his experiences at the posh Tonbridge School in Kent. There was some hope on Sherwin’s part that Nicholas Ray might direct the film. Sherwin admired Ray’s work, particularly his similarly themed film about youth alienation and delinquency, Rebel With A Cause. But after Ray became ill, Sherwin and fellow writer John Howlett were on the lookout for another person to helm the picture and fortuitously happened upon Lyndsay Anderson in a Soho pub. The rest, as they say, is history. If would win the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

The Selfish Giant

Dir. Clio Barnard (2013)

Connor Chapman in Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant.

Clio Barnard’s striking drama The Selfish Giant sees two pre-teens find solace from boredom by “scrapping” for a local dealer. It followed her startling – and equally impressive – 2010 drama-documentary The Arbor.

Both films take place in Bradford, West Yorkshire, each drawing on similar themes of familial upheaval, identity, self-fulfilment, and growing up amidst rundown council estates and destitution.

Unlike The Arbor, The Selfish Giant is a piece of fiction but maintains the same sense of purpose that distinguished Barnard’s earlier work. Both films share the personal battles of their real or imagined characters, conceived around extinguishing childhood naivety as immature, fragile, inexperienced minds are thrust into an imperfect adult world and its multi-faceted challenges and obstacles.

The Selfish Giant also boasts a brilliantly naturalistic performance from debutant Connor Chapman. The young boy – picked for the role from a local school casting session – displays a raw, unscripted energy that’s only truly gleaned from the untrained.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Dir. Lynne Ramsay (2011)

I felt like the one being bullied in Lynne Ramsay’s provocative film about one mother’s turmoil in the aftermath of her son’s high school killing spree. There’s an emotional ferocity about the way Ramsay nightmarishly portrays Tilda Swinton’s hollowed out response to the destructiveness of her offspring, as the director mixes tenses to disorientating effect.

We follow an intelligent, career-driven and successful middle class mother struggling to parent a socially dysfunctional child and the cause-effect outcome of her son’s murderous rampage as the woman, bereft of all her luxuries, unsuccessfully tries to put back the pieces of a broken life.

One of the interesting aspects of We Need To Talk About Kevin is the sense of blame inherent in a mother whose child has committed an unspeakable act. Eva is reminded every day of her son’s murderous rampage as members of the public scowl and talk behind her back as well as to her face.

Meanwhile Kevin is spared this humiliation inside his prison cell, Eva’s torture lives on, her tormentor (her son) replaced by the town, which will neither forgive nor forget what happened. It is unforgivably hard to watch but its inherent sadness is its greatest power as the undercurrent of anger and remorse lingers wordlessly in every scene.

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