Starring Hailee Steinfeld. Rated 14A

Hailee Steinfeld, of True Grit and Pitch Perfect 2, wrangles the most from her part as Nadine, a spectacularly self-absorbed adolescent, in The Edge of Seventeen. The movie shares its title with a gay coming-of-age tale from 1998, and like so many teen dramedies of the past three decades, it plays like a wised-up version of those seminal John Hughes flicks, with less racism and a lot more swearing.

Here, according to flashbacks we get near the start, our heroine has a kind of built-in resistance to the high-school dynamics that dominate most such stories. Apparently, her inherently ornery personality was always at odds with slightly older brother Darian (played in the present by Everybody Wants Some!! lead Blake Jenner), born to win at everything he does.

With her doting dad out of the picture, Nadine has never really bonded with a mom (Kyra Sedgwick) too hung up on her golden boy to notice her. The dark-eyed girl’s antisocial nature has only allowed for one friend, the sweet-natured Krista (The Bronze’s Haley Lu Richardson), but that singular relationship is tested when Krista gravitates towards—well, guess who?

Nadine’s other confidant is her gruff-humoured history teacher (Woody Harrelson), who takes her tortured antics with a bucket of salt. Their push-pull scenes provide Edge with its only real whatchacallit. Despite plenty of sex talk and Juno-like back chatter, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig is content to pull off a pleasantly offbeat suburban comedy (shot in Vancouver, passing for the pre-Trump U.S.), in which relatively unidimensional characters have all the perks of upper-middle-class living—swimming pools, cars, violence-free and ethnically monotone parties—without showing signs of struggle or personal ambition.

We spend a sprawling, mostly agreeable, and very plainly shot 100 minutes with Nadine, but we never learn anything about her interests or ambitions outside of the two boys—one nice, the other nasty—she fancies. Her bedroom wall decorations are strictly Generic Teenage Girl, and while she brags that she only likes “old music and old movies”, these are never indulged. This absence feels less like unresolved quirks for Nadine and more like laziness on the part of the filmmakers.