HOLLYWOOD HIGH

A cultural history of teen movies—and, by extension, the American teenager.

Early in his second adult nonfiction book, Handy (Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, 2017) notes that “teenager” is a largely social construction. It was only in the 1930s that the demographic became more than just young Americans unprotected by labor laws and instead a cohort with spending money, ambition, and an ability to shape the zeitgeist. Early entries in the teen-film field were tame and shaped by moral uprightness, particularly Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy films, where a first kiss was a gee-willikers event. (Handy has good fun exploring how Rooney’s off-screen antics countered his chaste screen persona.) But on-screen transgression soon became the order of the day, be it through James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, no-adults-allowed beach-party flicks, Sean Penn’s stoner antihero in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, John Hughes’ defiant middle-class teens, up through Katniss Everdeen’s defiant postapocalyptic herodom in the Hunger Games films. Handy smartly balances scratching the target reader’s nostalgic itch for details on the making of films like The Breakfast Club while also exploring how each iteration of the genre reflects a generation’s concerns. American Graffiti sublimated ’70s post-Watergate stress; Mean Girls underscored early-oughts status anxiety; Twilight was canny counterprogramming for a generation overwhelmed by sex and drugs. Inevitably, given the genre’s range, Handy misses a lot: Classics like West Side Story and Heathers are mentioned only glancingly, horror is skipped, and indie gems like Pump Up the Volume are absent. One ungainly chapter crams together ’90s films Boyz n the Hood, Clueless, and Kids. Yet the book is a well-informed conversation starter that takes an often-maligned genre seriously.

Good, smart, occasionally naughty adolescent fun.