All rights reserved. That includes the hurdles clustered around high school, that mindless American purgatory for kids with brains and creativity. It's a tough road to travel in Whatever for the girl played by Anna Stockard, a talented painter who posters her bedroom with scenes of New York City. Her jerkwater Jersey town could be almost any mid-sized burg in America, a horizontal stretch of stop'n'shops strung out along roads that lead nowhere. Parents struggle to keep their heads up.
Teachers are fools.
Not that music doesn't play an important part. The soundtrack, which pulls from the punk and new wave popular in the early '80s, is meant to evoke the period in which Whatever is set, the period of Skoog's passage out of purgatory. It also accurately nails the ways teenagers use their music. Stockard cranks up the Jam to drown out her mother's hectoring. He wants to get his rocks off.