Maybe you’ve seen trailers for “The Edge of Seventeen,” a coming-of-age high school movie starring Hailee Steinfeld. The clips hint at the story of an overly dramatic teenager convinced she has it worse than anybody, constantly at the mercy of her incompetent mother and popular older brother. But, refreshingly, there’s more to it than that.
“I asked one of my friends the other day, ‘What do you think the movie is about?’ ” Steinfeld said. “Obviously, there are trailers out, and I’m curious as to what they’ve put together. And they’re so spot-on with what is being promoted, but it’s so much more than what that is, and I think that’s what’s special about this movie. Yeah, it’s a universal-themed movie, but there are so many things in it.”
Steinfeld plays Nadine, an awkward, sarcastic teen who feels like she’s on the outside of adolescence, save for her best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). But when Krista starts dating Nadine’s brother, Darian (Blake Jenner), it puts stress on a family already struggling with the death of Nadine’s father.
Not as light and frothy as the trailers would have you believe.
But then, Steinfeld hasn’t had the typical 19-year-old actor’s career. At 14, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her first role in a feature film, playing Mattie Ross in the Coen brothers’ remake of “True Grit.” To pursue acting more seriously, Steinfeld transitioned to homeschooling in the sixth grade, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a wealth of experiences to draw from to play Nadine.
“Once I had left school, people my age and adults were saying, ‘Oh, you bypassed [adolescent awkwardness] because you’re at home,’ ’’ Steinfeld said. “But I not only went through those experiences in school [prior to beginning homeschooling], but we still go through them regardless of whether we are in [school] or not, or where we’re from or what we do or who we are.”
Just from her few months at the beginning of sixth grade, Steinfeld was able to recall a number of experiences that helped her relate to Nadine’s angst. A classmate purposely smacking books out of her arms in the hallway, receiving prank calls or getting made fun of for being oblivious to Juicy Couture all quickly came to mind.
“It’s been built up over a matter of time with all those things that had happened to me,” she said. “To really be able to express myself through this character and these real-life situations was really something I needed.”
Perhaps it was this catharsis that made “The Edge of Seventeen” feel more meaningful to Steinfeld than other projects. She said that typically, when she receives a shooting schedule, she can map out which will be her “hell weeks” based on when she’ll film difficult scenes.
“But for some reason, with this movie, it was like every single thing, every moment counted,” Steinfeld said. “Every moment meant something. And whether it was dancing around in your room feeling like you were 10 years old to then feeling like, oh my God, I’m going to be an adult and this is my life and I have to live with myself. All those moments matter, and we all have them.
“The trajectory of the character and the fact that she goes from thinking that she’s got the world figured out and the answer to every question, to then realizing she doesn’t, to then realizing it’s OK,” she continued. “It’s a beautiful transition she has from the beginning to end. And reading that, it was so alive on the paper [that] to be able to just play it was an honor.”
The words on the page are the product of Kelly Fremon Craig, who also directed for the first time. Between Fremon Craig and working with Elizabeth Banks on “Pitch Perfect 2,” Steinfeld has recently experienced two rounds of what it feels like to have a woman behind the camera.
“I don’t think there’s anything one can do that the other can’t and vice versa, but yeah … I think there’s a different understanding that [women] have,” Steinfeld said. “Being able to talk to Kelly, and whether or not she’s been through that situation or similar situations, she’s a mom, she has a different perspective and a different understanding than a male figure would.”
Though Fremon Craig originally titled the film “Besties,” “The Edge of Seventeen” turned out to be more about a brother-sister relationship than a conflict between two friends. Though we initially see Darian as the stereotypical jerk older brother, it turns out Nadine’s perception is hardly the whole picture. Steinfeld said her relationship with Jenner evolved over the course of shooting to the point that it almost mirrored the growing closeness of Nadine and Darian.
“There was a moment on the staircase where he hugs me, and after he hugs me, he does this little, ‘Uh, all right. We had our moment.’ And I swear I’ve had that moment with my brother before. It’s so real,” Steinfeld said. “You have this competition between your siblings, and then you have these moments where you’re like, ‘Wow, I really do love you, and even though it sometimes seems like I can’t stand you, we’re family and we’re here for each other and we’re going through the same thing.’”
Steinfeld’s own brother, Griffin, is three years older than her, and it wasn’t hard for her to draw parallels between the movie and real life.
“Watching him go through high school and then not having that experience, I always felt like he was so ahead of me,” she said. “We’re so close now and it’s funny looking back on it, but there were times when he was going to parties and I was not getting invited because I wasn’t going to school so I didn’t have any way of getting invited to a party. And I was just like, ‘It’s cool, I guess I’ll just stay home.’”
There’s a lot going on in “The Edge of Seventeen” that could touch a nerve in a viewer’s life. Aside from the general awkwardness and the sibling rivalry, there’s social media anxiety, an inspiring teacher (Woody Harrelson), a complicated mother-daughter relationship, a sexual frankness sabotaged by a desire for human connection … the list goes on. But at the heart of it, there’s your classic kid just trying to make sense of her bubble.
“She’s allowed to be imperfect. She doesn’t have to fit this mold that her brother necessarily does or her mom once did or these girls at school,” Steinfeld said. “I think it’s the idea of young women and women in general, not feeling like they have to conform to a certain standard or mold that’s been created by society. And she’s totally outside of that box and she embraces it, and whether or not she knows it, she figures it out and she accepts it.”
