‘I Am Not Okay With This’ is a Dazzlingly Dark Look at Teen Angst and Superpowers

At first glance, I Am Not Okay With This feels like a show Frankenstein-ed together by Netflix’s infamous algorithm. You’ve got the production team behind Stranger Things partnering with the creative team behind The End of the F***ing World to make a half hour show about a frankly profane adolescent girl with superpowers trying to hide in plain sight in middle America. The soundtrack is killer, the main cast belongs — like Finn Wolfhard — to IT‘s Losers Club, and the series winks to John Hughes so often that it blinks to John Hughes. While convention wisdom says all this should result in a stiffly cynical show, I Am Not Okay With This roars on the screen with an untamed heart. In fact, I Am Not Okay With This is simply sublime.

I Am Not Okay With This is based on the graphic novel of the same name by acclaimed writer/artist Charles Forsman. The original work tells the story of young Sydney Novak, a teenage girl struggling to find herself in a grim world punctuated by Forsman’s sparse black and white style. Sydney is not only coping with depression, grief, the confusing hormones of puberty, the drama of adolescence, and a fractured relationship with her mother, but also the revelation that she can hurt people with her mind.

Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This takes this basic concept and lightens it a little. No longer is I Am Not Okay With This a meditation on what drives a young person to the brink, but an offbeat superhero origin story steeped in the unholy humiliation of being an ordinary teen. Director and creator Jonathan Entwistle (who previously adapted Forsman’s work in The End of the F***ing World) draws on pop culture references as varied as The Breakfast Club, X-Men, Dawson’s Creek, Carrie, and Pretty in Pink to highlight the dramatically cinematic scope of being a teenager. What grounds the story in heart-wrenching human emotion, though, is the show’s outstanding young cast.

18-year-old Sophia Lillis has been captivating audiences for a while now thanks to stellar turns as young Beverly Marsh in the IT movies as well as young Camille (aka Amy Adams) in HBO’s Sharp Objects. However, I Am Not Okay With This marks a major breakthrough for the actress. Lillis is at once cooly brittle and emotionally fragile, balancing the perfect imbalance of being a teenage girl. As Sydney, she manages to evoke the same kind of gamine-next-door energy that made Molly Ringwald an It Girl in the ’80s. More importantly, Sophia Lillis reveals that she is super-powered herself, at least in terms of her acting range.

Even if I Am Not Okay With This‘s story is focused on the inner demons of one young woman, the show feels so fresh and urgent because of its entire cast. Sofia Bryant shimmers onscreen as Sydney’s best friend Dina. She’s an effervescently kind beauty who manages to fill the screen with a raw sort of glamour that shines like a supernova in I Am Not Okay With This‘s Rust Belt setting. From the moment she skips down an empty street, it comes almost as a given that Sydney is madly in love with her. Kathleen Rose Perkins plays Syd’s mother as a tightly wound open sore. Just like her daughter, she is grappling with shames and secrets, and it’s this similarity that causes the most friction between the two. Even child actor Aidan Wojtak-Hissong manages to steal scenes as Sydney’s desperately good little brother, Aidan.

But the cast’s other major breakout has to be Wyatt Oleff. Like Lillis, Oleff is a graduate of the IT franchise, but up until now, he’s kind of faded in the background behind seemingly ready-made teen stars like Finn Wolfhard or Jack Dylan Grazer. I Am Not Okay With This pairs Oleff with a star-making role: Stanley Barber. Though the character is obviously a riff on the John Hughes fave Ducky, Oleff injects Barber with a quirky charisma that’s all his own. He tumbles through scenes like a spastic Fred Astaire and his chemistry with IRL best friend Sophia Lillis is as raw as it comes. As Stanley, Oleff is so unabashedly sweet that I predict a generation of quiet girls and sensitive boys are about to fall hard for him as an offbeat heartthrob.

I Am Not Okay With This is a darkly enchanting look at the bleaker side of having superpowers. From the panic and confusion of feeling alone, to the horror of recognizing your own oddness, the show leans hard into the superhero-story-as-metaphor-for-puberty cliché — but in a way that reclaims that tradition with real heart and modern cool. I Am Not Okay With This is hands down the most exciting new Netflix show of 2020, so far.

I Am Not Okay With This premieres on Netflix on February 26, 2020.