In real life, responding to a suicide threat with sarcasm is a terrible idea; doing it while you’re a high school teacher is probably criminal. But there’s an exception for Woody Harrelson, as the trailer for Edge of Seventeen shows—his perfect deadpan is any depressed teenager’s Achilles’ heel. The teenager in question is True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld, who seems pretty sarcastic about the whole suicide thing to begin with, so Woody’s in the clear. Mostly, Steinfeld is embarrassed about a text she sent and mad that her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) is hooking up with her brother. Having both a Hailee and a Haley in lead roles must have been a challenge for first-time director Kelly Fremon Craig (who also wrote the script), so we’re looking forward to behind-the-scenes footage of the inevitable mix-ups.
Kyra Sedgwick tackles the unenviable job of being mother to a teenage daughter and James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films picks up the rare “From the company that brought you …” trailer credit, which is the kind of thing you’d do too if you could list The Simpsons and Bottle Rocket. It seems like the film might benefit from more Harrelson (and fewer Beatles covers)—signs point to a Bob Odenkirk in The Spectacular Now–size role—but Steinfeld ending a love letter (well, text, anyway) with “We can do it in the Petland stockroom” is for the ages.
