Next up on the AFI list is George Lucas’s teen nostalgia movie. So this takes place in 1962, but if you didn’t know that, you’d 100% think “the fifties.” From reading reviews, it seems like this is one of those things where decades don’t line up exactly on the zeroes, and that in fact this is an authentic look at what small-town 1962 was like, even if it’s far more fifties than sixties to modern eyes.

The nostalgia is a big part of the point of the movie; if you read Ebert’s review, for instance, it’s essentially all about how the movie made him feel like he was a kid cruising the boulevard and going to the sock hop again. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it means that for non-Boomer audiences, the most notable appeal of the film is completely gone: None of us has a lick of nostalgia for that era, because of course we weren’t born yet.

So what’s left without that? Well, you’ve got a sizable cast of characters (four “main” characters, each with independent plotlines that interweave with each other and the larger cast of characters), you’ve got their stories playing out over the course of a single night in interesting ways, and you’ve got a movie that’s drenched in retro style both visual and (especially) aural — there’s a non-stop rock soundtrack that’s framed as a diegetic Wolfman Jack radio broadcast.

If you’ve seen the zillions of teen movies that use this template — everything from Dazed and Confused to Booksmart — the structure of the movie will be familiar to you. It’s well-enough executed, but doesn’t really have much to say. The big question the movie explores, sorta, is whether the two boys who are about to leave for college should do that, or if they should stay here with the friends and family and institutions that they know.

It’s an enjoyable movie, but it’s also something of a trifle. I think if you were trying to justify it on the AFI list, you’d have to say that it’s the first movie to really talk about teenagers using this structure, and I don’t know, maybe it is. But it feels inessential either way, tbh, and I suspect that the real reason it’s on the AFI list is that the people making the list in 2011 were of the age to be really moved by the nostalgia (as Ebert was in his review), and that it’ll disappear from the list when younger people update it someday.

ALSO: For the most part, you wouldn’t know that George Lucas is behind this movie, but: There is a character named “Bob Falfa” which is the most George Lucas character name this side of a Star War.