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Elsie Fisher stars in Eighth Grade, directed by Bo Burnham.Rebecca Cabage/The Associated Press

About a decade ago, a Boston writer reviewed a stand-up show by Bo Burnham at the Wilbur Theatre. At the time, Burnham, an 18-year-old from nearby Hamilton, Mass., was parlaying his YouTube-based stardom into something more traditional, with a comedy album deal signed and television specials to come. While noting the raunchy, condescending humour coming from the mouth of a cute, geeky and quick-witted teenager, the reviewer cautioned that Burnham better “find a new shtick before his boyish charm wears off.”

It is now 2018, and Burnham, at 27, still has some youthful appeal left in the tank – imagine a scruffier, slacker Matthew Modine in his prime. As far as a new shtick, Burnham has that in spades. Eighth Grade, a feature he wrote and directed, is a middle-school masterpiece and an extraordinarily sure-footed and sympathetic piece of filmmaking.

It’s a good thing, too, because Burnham had recently decided he no longer wished to do stand-up. As he has explained, he was over “expressing myself through myself.” His new shtick, then, couldn’t have come too soon.

“It feels good,” Burnham tells The Globe and Mail. “Knowing that I could do this makes me feel less scared about going back to stand-up.”

Scared? Burnham? But cockiness was part of his thing, wasn’t it?

“Stand-up felt like life and death every time,” he admits.

But could he go back?

“I could, but this film got me so excited about filmmaking.”

Might he go back?

“Let’s just say another film would be wonderful.”

Actually, let’s just say Eighth Grade is wonderful. The film stars Elsie Fisher as Kayla, a painfully shy eighth-grader who gives self-help tutorials on the internet that are really just pep talks to herself. Burnham captures the awkwardness, pain and insecurities of early adolescence gracefully, quietly and honestly. His touch is deft; his tone pitch-perfect.

The director gives much of the credit, though, to the young actor Fisher.

“Honestly, I think the film is just her,” Burnham explains. “I knew she was doing something special on set. I knew that was happening. If she could keep doing a good job, the movie couldn’t possibly be bad.”

Burnham saw hundreds of kids while searching for his lead actor, but Fisher stood out. For one thing, she was roughly the same age as the 13-year-old character she was portraying. “When you’re 16 playing 13, you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m going to be young now,’” Burnham says, ignoring a bagel and a couple of unopened cans of Red Bull as we chat. “But with Elsie, I would tell her the beauty of making stuff when you’re young is that you’re never going to be this again. So just be it – present people with the horizon of your thoughts.”

Playing young is something Burnham has experienced. In 2013, in his mid-20s, he starred as the titular teenager in a short-lived MTV comedy series he co-created, Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous.

As for presenting people with the “horizon of your thoughts,” that, too, was a personal experience and self-learned lesson of Burnham’s. “Instead of trying to give audiences things I’d figured out, I realized I should be presenting them with things I’m struggling with.”

Burnham struggles with anxiety, as does Eighth Grade’s lead girl, who lives each day with stomach butterflies that never stop fluttering.

“I didn’t have that as a 13-year-old, but I have it now” Burnham says. “Part of the joke is that the 13-year-old in the film is as far along emotionally in her journey as a 27-year-old man. I didn’t have these honest conversations with myself about my anxiety until I was 24.”

Is it a gender thing, for a girl to experience unease earlier in life than a boy?

“I don’t think it’s innate,” Burnham says quickly. “But culturally, young women are forced to see themselves in the world. They picture their presentations. It’s more of an existential experience.”

That being said, Eighth Grade, Burnham wants to make clear, is not is a film geared to women. “It’s the human experience,” he says. “The Kayla character is as good a conduit to what it means to be human being as anybody.”

Neither is the film nostalgic. Yes, it takes place in the last week of the school year, but this isn’t a middle-school Dazed and Confused. Still, while Burnham isn’t asking the viewer to repeat the eighth grade, he did take pleasure in working with young actors.

”When you get to be my age, you have to take an ice bath and two hours of warm-up to get into a head space and to get away from yourself,” Burnham says. “Kids, though, are so desperate to imagine.”

One wonders when actors lose the natural pretend.

“Probably at 17,” Burnham guesses. “When you first get your driver’s licence. They take your picture and you turn in your imagination.”

Burnham laughs. I laugh. Even the publicist, hovering in indication that our interview time is over, laughs. Sounds like Burnham has his old shtick back.

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