Yet another high-school misfit movie - but this one has some original angles

Is there room for yet another movie about a high-school misfit, loner, weirdo, friendless victim of bullying? Yes, of course, the supply of such movies will apparently never end, the latest being On the Edge of Seventeen, which features a protagonist, Nadine, who is all of the above and, like many such protagonists (see Juno) speaks more like a Hollywood screenwriter than like any teenager, much less a loser-misfit. This film also suffers from the flaw that besets many teenage-loser movies: almost without exception, the lead characters are never convincing as the misfit victim; as in this movie, they are almost always cute, attractive, intelligent, most likely to be widely popular or, at the least, far from friendless. So, OK, with all these flaws acknowledged, let it also be noted that this is a pretty good and entertaining film about Nadine's struggle to find her place. The writing is intelligent, sometimes witty, and the writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig finds a few new angles to explore on this familiar turf: Nadine has had a life-long jealousy of her handsome and popular brother (Darian), and when he starts a relationship with her one and only friend that upsets everything in Nadine's life and in their family of 3. Craig also goes against convention by having Nadine confide regularly in her history teacher (Woody Harrelson) who, against expectation, is acerbic and cynical - the development of his character and his relationship with Nadine is the highlight of this movie. As in all comedies, Nadine grows over the course of the film, learns about the high-school pecking order and learns to live outside of same, and earns her way to social inclusion and a happy ending - orchestrated, yes; believable, not quite; but a feel-good movie that takes some original pathways on this very well-trodden ground.