Coming of age is a constant negotiation between who you are and who you’re not — it’s the most intense period of a process that will last for the rest of your life. Coming-of-age movies naturally tend to dramatize that negotiation, which is why so many of them hinge on hollowed out Harry Potter types who become the most boring characters in their own stories: It’s easier to paint on a portrait on a blank slate, easier to keep score of what someone is adding to (or subtracting from) themselves when you start from scratch. The only problem with that approach is that it strands a lot of very similar teenagers in films about how they’re not like everyone else.…

Definitively one of those films that I liked although I'm not entirely sure why.

I'd imagine that the trio of lead performances from Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe and Alex Roe probably had a lot to do with it. Although I'd say that Chalamet's character is not very well written at all, they all still shine, and we've come to expect that pretty much all the time from the former two.

Yes, that was really the only major weakness that I could identify in Hot Summer Nights, the fact that it doesn't really establish Chalamet's destructive personality nearly strongly enough throughout. His relationships with Monroe and Roe are well written and contain some nice movements but he on his own is…