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 contra