So this is a movie about youths despairing because they’re living here at the end of all things, in the worst of all possible worlds, where everything is a lie and the economy is a shambles, and there is no hope for anything, only a boot stamping on their face forever.

It is 1990.

So, y’know, it’s hard to take this too seriously. Kids, you’re about to go through the best decade in all of human existence, you’re just complaining because you’re dumbasses who don’t know any better, c’mon now.

To be fair to the movie, though, it seems to kinda know this? Like, one big throughline is that this kid who gets on his pirate radio show and rants bombastically about everything is actually just a quiet nerd. And he talks a big game about how horny and sex-addled he is on the radio, but when an IRL girl tries to talk to him, he’s scared of her and runs away — she basically has to chase him down.

Then too, the movie is putting its finger on the scale by giving their school an actually evil principal who is doing blatantly illegal things to juice the school’s numbers (like expelling people with below-average test scores to bring up the average). Of course, the bullshit dad that the protagonist is rebelling against is the superintendent who ends up firing her after this comes to light, so still ends up feeling like his rebellion isn’t wholly justified.

Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie. But I’ve never been particularly sympathetic to angsty teen movies; and ironically, the time period makes it really hard for me to like this one — if it were about a modern kid, I’d be like “kids, man, it’s rough being a kid these days, I get it.” But when I’m watching someone who was a teenager when I was a teenager, all I can do is roll my eyes at them, because that’s a peer.

Still, I would have absolutely loathed this if I’d seen it when it came out, whereas now I can just say that it’s a reasonably well-done version of a trope that doesn’t really resonate with me.