Growing up absurd in the 1960s

Rating: 10/10 (2 August 2000)

Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) is eighteen in 1968, the year the world went a little crazy ... or a lot. She can't relate to her parents, her school, her future. To cure a headache, she downs an entire bottle of aspirin with a whole bottle of vodka. She is packed off to a looney bin for wayward teens.
The girls she meets there, her co-loonies, are in some ways more in touch with themselves than most of the "normal" folks walking around loose out there. They may have unfortunate habits, but how different does that make them? Her best friend Lisa (Angelina Jolie) is so refreshingly honest it's hard to bear in mind she's a sociopath.
Again, these girls hurt. They hurt themselves, they hurt others. But so did we all back then, and today. Life is like that. This movie captures it meaningfully by showing us people we care about deeply, in spite of what they do and what they're like. They are just like the people we really knew, back in crazy 1968, and just like us today, underneath our brave faces and cynicism.