This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
Over black coffee and eggs, in the back of a diner where you have to enter through a gas station, two friends and I were discussing the ever-thrilling topic of our postgraduate plans. In an effort to hide my sincerity, I told my friends in an overly melodramatic tone that the only thing I’ve ever loved since I was a little kid was movies — and, damn, if something at some point didn’t come of that, it would have all been a waste.
But, like any good Dartmouth student, I’ve decided to go corporate in a field hardly adjacent to what I’ve studied in college, so until I completely alter my career trajectory, enjoy this: the last installment of Deep Cuts, aptly centered around coming of age, perfect for the numbing aftermath of graduation.
1. “Rushmore” (Hulu)
When I decided to make this list, I was originally looking for movies that focused on the aimlessness of one’s early twenties, but when I remembered Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore,” I knew I had to break my own rules. I first saw “Rushmore” on my 14th birthday — my golden birthday — making me just one year younger than the film’s main character Max Fischer, played by a teenage Jason Schwartzman. This is important because “Rushmore” is a film about people completely out of sync with their age. Max is 15 going on 45: he’s founded countless obscure school clubs, has decided that Harvard is his safety school and plans grandiose fundraising events for things like the building of a new aquarium. He’s insufferable, overreaching, but, at the same time, entirely compelling.
I loved this movie so much when I first saw it because, at 14, I felt just like him; a few years earlier I had even looked like him too, with obtuse braces and big, dark-rimmed glasses that consumed my face. As an only child who spent most nights around the dinner table talking with three adults — my mother, aunt and uncle — one could say that I was a little out of touch with my peers and, like Max, I was interested in just about every activity and sport under the sun. Even though it’s been years since I’ve had to wear a stuffy school uniform or wait for my mom to pick me up from school, “Rushmore” still resonates with me. I’ve realized it’s essentially a coming of age, for all ages. My mom remarks to this day that she still feels like she’s 17, while I spent most of my childhood feeling older than I was — that’s the essence of “Rushmore.” Many of us at Dartmouth probably came here thinking we had it all figured out, and now that we’re leaving we feel like we know nothing — except, hopefully, the material that was on our last Economics final.
As for the adults, Herman Blume, played with tired precision by Bill Murray, is a father of two students at “Rushmore” and quickly befriends Max, not out of the latter’s wisdom, but out of shared immaturity. Eventually, this leads to the demise of their friendship, as they compete for the same woman, Rosemary Cross, an unassuming schoolteacher played by Olivia Williams.
If you’re familiar with Anderson, “Rushmore” is one of his least stylistic and, arguably, his most moving films because of it. Instead of the distance created by overly bright colors or absurd storylines, you get closer to the emotional center, which declares that coming of age isn’t a clean break from childhood. Ultimately, “Rushmore” is about the awful, necessary awkwardness of growing up — how it can feel like failure more than transformation, at any age. In the end, there’s no tidy catharsis, just a vague sense that, like the four years we’ve endured here, everyone might, hopefully, be a little less lost than they were at the beginning.
2. “Metropolitan” (HBO Max)
If you had to put Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” in a box, it could be categorized as a high-brow comedy, but that description doesn’t do justice to the strange ache at its core. On the surface, it seems to be about a bunch of twentyish preps sitting in opulent Manhattan apartments over winter break, tossing around half-formed opinions on politics, love and books they haven’t read like they’re debating the fate of the free world. But beneath the champagne and tuxedos is a film about what it feels like to grow up too slowly and pretend too much along the way.
Princeton student Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), the main character, is a lower-class New Yorker, home for the holidays, when he accidentally encounters this group of debutantes one night after sharing a cab to a party. Although he’s not as wealthy as the rest of the characters, he’s an idealist with vaguely socialist leanings and an affinity for borrowed intellectualism, so he fits right in.
My mother first showed me “Metropolitan” during winterim of my freshman year, when I was either feeling down about my first quarter at Dartmouth or reminiscing about it. Revisiting it now, it’s hard not to feel a little exposed. Though Clements is great, the film’s true strength is its ensemble of semi-delusional, hyper-verbal supporting characters, each a calibrated sketch of young adulthood in arrested development. They are seemingly brilliant, but at the same time, insecure and deeply performative, cloaking themselves in irony and faux-intellectualism to mask their fear of the uncertain future. Dartmouth students, don’t look too close: You might just see your own reflection.
Stillman’s genius, however, lies in how gently he skewers his characters, and, by association, many of us. The film is satirical, yes, but it’s never cruel. He understands that these young people are trying, fumbling toward identity with all the wrong tools — pretension, irony, nostalgia. And, it’s easy to laugh at, until you realize you did, or are doing, the exact same thing.
3. “All the Real Girls” (Free on Tubi)
If there was actually ever a deep cut in any of these lists — this is the one. David Gordon Green’s “All the Real Girls” is the kind of movie that dares you to be sincere, then punishes you for trying. The movie follows Paul, a twenty-something Lothario in a dead-end mill town, who falls — slowly and sincerely — for Noel, his best friend’s younger sister. She’s just returned from boarding school and hasn’t really lived yet. He’s lived a little too much and broken many hearts along the way, but after falling for Noel suddenly decides he wants to be serious — for the first time in his life. Their relationship is tender, halting and never quite on steady ground, which is exactly the point.
The dialogue feels like real people stumbling through feelings they don’t have the vocabulary for. Every moment lingers uncomfortably, like they’re afraid the second they name something, it’ll break, and they’re not wrong. Paul treats Noel like a symbol of innocence and, in some ways, redemption until she does something human, and Paul can’t handle it.
That’s what makes “All the Real Girls” so effective — and so brutal. It understands that when you’re young, love isn’t some sweeping, cinematic triumph. It’s fumbling, self-absorbed and often unfair. Paul thinks he’s rewriting his narrative by loving Noel, but he’s still stuck in the same emotional script — just with nicer lighting. Noel, meanwhile, is expected to carry the purity of the story on her back until it breaks her. No one gets out clean.
This is a coming-of-age story disguised as a love story. Or maybe it’s a love story about how people fail to come of age. Either way, it feels incredibly relevant to the stage of our lives we just lived, and the one we’re entering into — many of us, I’m sure, have been Pauls, with our ugly histories and inability to adequately find the words that fit emotions, and we’re about to go out into the world be Noels: clean, blank slates — or so people will think.
