A timeline of remembering the past through coming-of-age movies

In honor of Didi, we chart over 70 years of history, told through coming-of-age movies

By Rory Doherty  |  July 23, 2024 | 9:00am
Photo credits (clockwise from top right): Gramercy Pictures, Universal Pictures, Disney, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures
Film Lists Nostalgia
A timeline of remembering the past through coming-of-age movies

Ah, the past! As celluloid is first and foremost a method of recording things around us, it’s no surprise that archiving and recreating history, both communal and personal, is so central to the cinematic medium. But the one thing we know about the times is that they are a’changing, meaning films that look backwards often capture the contemporary, forward-pushing social momentum that has swept us all up, for good or ill, throughout history. 

Because things a’change for young people at such a breakneck pace, often without their permission, the coming-of-age genre can pinpoint exact moments where thresholds were crossed, looking back when its characters are only concerned with looking forward. For a good part of the last century, filmmakers have painstakingly recreated years where it was clear, maybe only upon reflection, that culture was shifting alongside the adolescent generation. Sean Wang’s Dìdi takes no prisoners by making audiences feel ancient by setting its nostalgic story of the twilight days of middle school in… 2008—surely one of the most recent period settings for a coming-of-age film. How do we know that? Because we laid out a timeline of over 70 years of history as they were remembered by nostalgic coming-of-age movies.

The criteria: it doesn’t matter if it’s a retro pastiche or moving autofiction, so long as the coming-of-age story necessitated looking back into the past to reflect on change, it qualified. Films also had to be set in a specific year, so exemplary titles like The Virgin Suicides and Aftersun that play it coy about when they take place in the ’70s or ’90s were disqualified. Still, these 25 attempts to recall the past through cinema make for a powerful timeline of laughter and heartbreak, as their youthful characters are ready to take on new, grown-up horizons. Expect a ridiculous amount of needle-drops, cringe-inducing attention to period-accurate slang, and more respectable actors playing stern-but-heartfelt parents than you know what to do with.

1951—as remembered by The Last Picture Show (1971)

It may not be apt to start this list with such a turgid and faded view of the past, but a lot of the time, we’re sad to say, the past is really bleak. The Eisenhower-skeptical, anti-nostalgic mood Peter Bogdanovich conjures (adapting the semi-autobiographical novel by Larry McMurtry) resists languishing in the rosily remembered years that other films on this list pine to return to—when we start our story, those years are certifiably over. We lie instead in a postwar America aware of how severely the world has changed and how keenly their small Texan town world is lacking.

1958—as remembered by Grease (1978)

Whew, enough of that cynical deconstruction of memory—throw on your leather jackets and pink skirts and let’s go watch some automobile accidents! Perhaps the reason this smash hit musical has such an enduring charm is because it skewers corny nostalgia with some ’70s cynicism—life is not peachy for our singing-and-dancing 30-something high schoolers, regardless of what social cliques they fall into. Perhaps Grease contains a self-aware hint that the grimy late-70s would also be remembered with an insincere yearning (spoilers: of course they were).

1959—as remembered by Stand By Me (1986)

There ain’t nothing that’ll kickstart adolescent ennui better than seeing a child’s corpse. In this Rob Reiner x Stephen King collab, the charming grit and grossness of childhood is punctured by uniquely small-town horror—familial grief, teenage cruelty, and flashes of meaningless tragedy. Just as these 12-year-olds are about to enter an age of increased agency and responsibility, it is revealed to them that they never stop being helpless to the world’s violence. These youth are on the cusp of a decade of political disillusionment, the Vietnam War, and the birth and death of counterculture that they never saw coming. Jesus, does anyone?

1961—as remembered by An Education (2009)

Hopping across the pond for this period piece, Danish director Lone Scherfig looked at the blindspots of the British class system in a year that was both at the eve of a liberatory decade and in a postwar state of precarity. In the film, an aspirational schoolgirl (Carey Mulligan) is seduced by an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) whose sophistication disarms her parents from the troubling reality of their relationship—he belongs to the class that everyone should aspire to, and therefore implicitly trust. Just like the memoir it was based on by Lynn Barber, An Education necessitates being set in a more ambiguous moral age, where the nostalgic act of looking back is complicated by being able to identify uncomfortable truths, and thus become disillusioned to the past’s glimmer.

1962—as remembered by American Graffiti (1973)

Do you know how much 1973 must have sucked for audiences to lose their mind over a nostalgia throwback movie set in 1962? After the Vietnam War, a constitutional crisis, and the death of counterculture, returning to halcyon days where all you had to worry about was nabbing a seat at the diner and cruising ‘round town in your Chevy with your best gal must have felt like the Garden of Eden, even if it was only ten years prior. Pre-Star Wars, George Lucas conjured a different type of fantasy with a film that also benefited from wizardry on the soundtrack—41 Original Hits From The Soundtrack Of American Graffiti went triple platinum in the U.S., because nothing recreates the mood and texture of a lost age than expensive licensing deals.

1964—as remembered by The Outsiders (1983)

The S.E. Hinton novel this was based on was published contemporarily with the era depicted in The Outsiders, in 1967, meaning director Francis Ford Coppola is largely responsible for the occasionally treacly but always moving nostalgic lens, which cast a slew of rising stars as a fraught band of brothers in gangland strife whose performances ooze with Dean and Brando-esque angst. The boyish adventurism of this adolescent melodrama can handle moments of Shakespearean violence; as the golden sunset falls on Tulsa, there’s a keen sense that everyone’s lives will become more precarious and less independent as the film’s found family disintegrates in the final act.

1965—as remembered by Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Another auteur-driven coming-of-age film set in the mid-60s about orphan autonomy resolved with institutional childcare, Wes Anderson’s sweetest film pairs two of the director’s best child performances (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) with a mission of adventure, love, and resistance from the constrictions of their island community. This is what counterculture looked like off the coast of New England. Moonrise Kingdom is as arch and ironic as your typical Anderson movie, but with an added edge of fantasy and preciousness—constantly aware of the slippery, transient nature of both this young romance and how it’s remembered.

1970—as remembered by Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)

Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel was not nostalgic, but urgently contemporary. It charmingly and shrewdly identified the difficulties of early adolescence in an increasingly secular and economically-shifting America—many felt the country was taking steps to grow up just like the book’s titular preteen. It took nearly 50 years for Blume to agree to a film adaptation, and director Kelly Fremon Craig had the unenviable task of capturing the immediacy and realism of Blume’s book 50+ years after the fact. Thanks to an ensemble of practically glowing performances, all the key concerns of Blume’s novel are translated intact; it’s not a nostalgic film, rather one concerned about what has endured in the female adolescence experience.

1973—as remembered by Crooklyn (1994)

We’ve now hit the point of our list where films are set after our first entry was released—time is funny like that. Spike Lee’s semi-autobiographical account of a Bed-Stuy summer was co-written by his siblings, and the multiple closely-linked screenwriters contribute to the film’s noisy, stream-of-consciousness style, which proves advantageous to Lee’s depiction of a seven-person Black family in a charged neighborhood of brownstones. Crooklyn features the usual hallmarks of coming-of-age autofiction: back-to-back needle-drops, profound alienation outside the household, and poignant glimpses of struggling parents (a never-better Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo). Lee’s film rises in overheated and trembling volume throughout, feeling eerily close to a group of grown-up siblings shouting memories over each other and hitting upon hard family truths in the process.

1976—as remembered by Dazed And Confused (1993)

Like American Graffiti before it, Dazed And Confused gives an ensemble, one-night glimpse into a mass threshold-crossing moment set in the filmmaker’s neck of the woods. The laid-back, shaggy-haired musings of the last day of school in Austin, Texas are tinged with missed opportunities and pithy philosophy, an equal mix of despondency and liberation that was gifted to the estimated one hundred young actors (including Ben Affleck, Milla Jovavich, Parker Posey…) for Linklater’s personal-but-collective film. It’s difficult to tell who a film like Dazed And Confused belongs to—a lot of the characters were workshopped and altered by their performers, even if they didn’t grow up in the time the film is set. It’s what gives the film a sort of timeless quality, suggesting the American Teenager is a perpetual concept unfixed in 20th century history.

1979—as remembered by 20th Century Women (2016)

Mike Mills based his breakout film Beginners on his father having come out of the closet during his twilight years. His follow-up film turned to his mother, telling a fictionalized account of a spirited woman raising a teenage boy with a found family of young women in Southern California. Central to the film, which surveys different generations of SoCal women from a curious and impressionable male perspective, are motifs of fertility and contraception that took center stage in ‘70s American life, as sexual agency and interpersonal kinship starts defining these women’s (and man’s) search for fulfillment. It’s a perfect moment for a filmmaker to look back on: all the characters are burnt out from tiresome journeys or sit on the precipice of new horizons.

1980—as remembered by Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Richard Linklater followed the Academy Award-winning success of Boyhood with a spiritual successor to Dazed And Confused, a bromance hangout movie set during the induction week of a Texan college in the fall of ‘80. Starring up-and-comers like Glen Powell, Zoey Deutch, Tyler Hoechlin, and Wyatt Russell, Everybody Wants Some!! operates on a policy of being as loose and unimposing as it can be, enjoying the good vibes of an off-campus baseball house. In true 1980 Texas fashion, these dazzling men care more about looking good for a night out than the night itself, and no-one checks whether everyone in their house is actually matriculated. Linklater graduates from the ‘70s with a rollicking wave of good vibes—as if he’d do it any other way.

1981—as remembered by Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Ostensibly a parody of summer camp movies of the very early ‘80s, this cult classic is much more interested in pastiching the way films like Meatballs and Summer Camp presented an artificial fantasy of youth when they came out. Expect jarring needle drops, insane hair, and tiny, tiny shorts—this enduring comedy is less about looking back nostalgically at the early ‘80s and more about pointing out how ludicrously the early ‘80s looked at itself. Like other ensemble films on this list, the cast contributes to a patchwork of conflict and joy, and the fact that some of them are stunningly deranged further demonstrates how insincerely the summer camp genre reflected life for the younger generation.

1982—as remembered by Son Of Rambow (2012)

Back in early ‘80s England, you could take a video camera and tripod into a matinee screening of Rambo: First Blood and just record the whole damn thing. If you did, you might turn the world of an 11-year-old Plymouth Brethren boy upside-down. Garth Jennings’s loving ode to making movies as a kid is dripping in era-specific details, not limited to: abusive teachers, general lacks of supervision, and the allure of French exchange students in a small-town school. The most affecting period detail comes in the widespread antagonism towards underachieving underprivileged kids, a symptom that originated before 1982 and has continued long after it, but the vileness of the classist Thatcher years certainly emboldened it.

1984—as remembered by Boy (2010)

The seeds for Taika Waititi’s mega-blockbuster success lie in his early dramedies, and this throwback to the aspirations and disappointments of a childhood with absent parents taps into a pathos that is evident in all the director’s work since. Set in mid-80s Tairāwhiti Gisborne, a Michael Jackson-obsessed Māori boy spins wild fantasies of his distant father, half to impress his friends and half-hoping they’ll come true. When his father returns (Waititi, channeling a terrific blend of bravado and patheticness), fantasy and reality collide—and in the isolated New Zealand community, the truth behind the boy’s coping strategy/imagination hits incredibly hard. It’s not just nostalgia that tints how we reflect. Sometimes we warp reality while it’s happening to us.

1985—as remembered by Sing Street (2016)

Eight years since it premiered, it’s clear that this Dublin-set coming-of-age musical replaced John Carney’s previous film Once as the most enduring and appealing Irish musical of modern times. Sing Street transports us to inner-city Dublin, where young Conor’s arrival at a Christian Brothers school kickstarts his student-led band, all so he can impress his older crush. With toe-tapping original numbers and a nimble examination of difficult family life, Carney channels the hopeful/hopeless yearning of teenage pop into a hometown rife with conflict and poor prospects.

1987—as remembered by Adventureland (2009)

Superbad director Greg Mottola made a considerably smaller splash with his follow-up Adventureland, which looked at the slower and more mundane amblings of a theme park worker stuck in the quagmire between college and adult life. The film has a winning pair of leads with Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as colleagues navigating a gray zone of infidelity, insecurity, and financial instability, localized in a Pennsylvania adventure park community that engenders both immediacy and estrangement from day to day. A great film about looking back and hyper-fixating on lots of little things you didn’t do right.

1988—as remembered by Donnie Darko (2001)

Have you ever considered that the capitalist social structure of the late ‘80s caused a lot of ennui? Angst drips over our dimension and others in Richard Kelly’s cult classic, as thoroughly despondent teenager Donnie spits immature insults at religious life coaches (played by Patrick Swayze, perfectly weaponizing his own late ‘80s charm) and drowns in a suburban prison until he is tasked with saving the world in the most cynical, existential emo-fantasy way possible. It’s a credit to Kelly’s ingenuity that Donnie Darko’s power/sacrifice fantasy is so enduring; despite the Tears For Fears and Joy Division on the soundtrack, the morbid way Donnie saves the world reflects the shallow, bitter way teens have seen the world around them for decades.

1991—as remembered by Janet Planet (2023)

Not the first nor last time summer camps appear on this list, Annie Baker’s portrait of heartrending codependency begins with our young protagonist insisting she’ll kill herself if her mom doesn’t take her home. The stability of 11-year-old Lacy and her single mother Janet is perennially turned over and examined throughout the film, as Baker lets us see a relationship through the lens of the partners and friends that Janet attaches herself to, who in turn become Lacy’s window into the world beyond her mother. The regional, isolated location of the film cuts it off from a lot of 1991-specific details, except for an insular New Age agrarian commune led by Elias Koteas whose general acceptance in the local community feels very accurate to the retro, rural feel of the film.

1992—as remembered by The Perks Of Being A Wallflower (2012)

Despite being adapted and directed by the author of the book it’s based on (they let you do that?!) The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is actually good. In its portrayal of a lonely teen living with swallowed trauma and confused grief in the early ‘90s, author/screenwriter/director Stephen Chbosky injects our casually hurtful and sporadically nurturing teen relationships with acute psychological sensitivity. The film was looking back further than the novel (Chbosky’s novel was published in 1999), but early ‘90s Pittsburgh is still draped in a wistful, yearning energy in no small part due to a soundtrack of wall-to-wall bangers.

1993—as remembered by The Miseducation Of Cameron Post (2018)

Of the two awards-friendly indie dramas about queer conversion camps released in 2018, Cameron Post wins out over Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, with Desiree Akhavan bringing a vibrant, uncertain energy that underlines the tragedy of places like this and makes the characters’ fight for liberty feel more vital. Conversion camps have been in operation before and after the film’s 1993 setting, but the pre-internet, pre-cellphone status quo means that the isolation feels sharp and the micro-community that the queer, BIPOC characters establish within the camp’s boundaries feels all the more necessary.

1996—as remembered by mid90s (2018)

The title does indeed check out—1996 is in the mid-90s. Before he become really weird about his therapist to the point of muddying their professional relationship with a biographical documentary, Jonah Hill debuted as a filmmaker with this slice-of-life skateboarding drama, where Katherine Waterson is completely exasperated for the best part of 80 minutes about her teenage son hanging out with a friendly group of older skaters. There’s an affecting bluntness to how Hill restages the difficulty of suburban L.A. home life, where older siblings treat you like a punching bag, people drive when they shouldn’t, and alarming behavior isn’t treated as gravely as it probably should.

2002—as remembered by Turning Red (2022)

Welcome to the 2000s! One of Pixar’s more winning films of the past decade looked at a unique puberty for an Asian Canadian girl—turning into a giant red panda whenever she gets too animated. No, the film did not acknowledge the global event of the September 11th attacks, but the gleeful insistence on featuring the type of teenage music, style, and vernacular that makes our older versions cringe proves a useful weapon in getting us invested in the story of teenage becoming. Yes, this young girl/red panda is cringe, but she is also free.

2003—as remembered by Lady Bird (2017)

Sacramento got its Big Hollywood Moment in Greta Gerwig’s affecting coming-of-age film charting the final high school days of Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, it’s the titular role) in a family under financial and interpersonal strain. Lady Bird spends the whole film trying to craft meaning and beauty out of the boredom of her sun-soaked town, falling for misleading boys and getting on her mom’s last nerve. As Lady Bird’s mother, Laurie Metcalf delivers perhaps the greatest put-upon parent in a coming-of-age film, treating her daughter with a level of scrutiny and confusion that veers between valid and unfair as the two women learn how best to love each other. Lady Bird looks back at a difficult reality of small-town American life with a nostalgia tinged with melancholy, trying to recollect how our parents must have felt when we were acting up the most.

2008—as remembered by Dìdi (2024)

We’re going to need to re-calibrate the cringe-o-meter for this one, guys. Filmmaker Sean Wang so faithfully recreates the middle-school goofs and faux pas of the first generation to grow up with social media and YouTube with such pinpoint accuracy that it’s almost lethal. Joan Chen steps up as the put-upon mother in charge of two Taiwanese-American teens who might as well be from different planets, so alien are their social experiences from each other. Young Chris edits YouTube compilations, insults friends to curry social favor, and is blatantly excluded from digitally-arranged plans. In telling the boy’s graduation into high school, Wang identifies how quickly the internet regenerates into unrecognizable states—the ways a teen uses the internet in 2008 now seem encased in amber, a perfectly antiquated specimen with which we can examine the alienation they delivered to an entire generation.

 
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