Every teenager has superpowers. Every puberty is an origin story. You transform biologically and change shape; hair begins to grow from your skin; you acquire the terrifying ability to create another human being using cells from your own body.Superhero stories have played with this connection before, from “Spider-Man,” with Peter Parker wrestling with his newfound responsibility and ability to shoot webs, to “Marvel’s Runaways” on Hulu, in which superpowers are a freighted family legacy. “I Am Not Okay With This,” whose first season arrives on Netflix Wednesday, is firmly within both the superhero and teen-angst traditions, and, fair warning, is not immune to the clichés of either.I Am Not Okay with This Season 1
What distinguishes it, however, beyond a tart voice and a pair of engaging performances, is that it commits as fully to its YA half as to its biff-pow-blam half.
Sydney (Sophia Lillis), a disaffected, self-described “boring 17-year-old white girl” in the polluted burg of Brownsville, Pa., is developing confusing emotional and sexual feelings and a gross patch of acne on her thighs. Also: When she gets angry, she can break things with her mind.“Okay,” to its benefit, takes each of these transformations equally seriously. It’s not really even a superhero story per se, though its seven-episode first season may be the introduction to one.The series is adapted from a graphic novel by Charles Forsman (“The End of the ____ing World”) by the director Jonathan Entwistle and the writer Christy Hall. Entwistle was also behind Netflix’s “End” adaptation, and you see that show’s DNA in the bloody in-media-res beginning and the opening monologue, in which Sydney gives her diary a four-letter salutation.
