‘I Am Not Okay With This’ Review: You’d Like Her When She’s Angry

Beyond this core pair, the characterizations are mostly flat: cliquish students, stuffy authority figures and clueless grown-ups. Sydney’s overtaxed mother, Maggie (Kathleen Rose Perkins), gets the occasional character-deepening scene; Stanley’s brutish trucker dad (Mark Colson) is not so well-served, and Brad is essentially a human varsity jacket.

“Okay” shares producers with Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” and it also shares that show’s love of pastiche. As it went on, I grew more and more conscious of the teen-culture parts it was built from — “Sixteen Candles” here, “Carrie” there, and the fifth episode is a full-on “Breakfast Club” homage, complete with a recon-mission caper and a burnout-girl character in the John Bender role.

As in Netflix’s “Sex Education,” set in a British idea of an American high school, “Okay” is full of 1980s music cues, both soundtrack and diegetic, to the extent that I had to double back and make sure it wasn’t a period piece. It is not; it just loves the ’80s, to the point that Stanley is an aficionado of VHS tapes. (“Best platform there is.”)

This device, in “Okay” and elsewhere, may be just a sign of how the pop culture of the past is ever more accessible, though it sometimes makes me wonder whether I am simply watching an old person’s idea of young people. (As someone who listened to Prefab Sprout when it was age-appropriate, I am probably not the one to answer that.)

Still, as in “Stranger Things” — which uses its recycled references like a joyous collage — this nostalgia also serves a point, albeit a darker one. From the retro aesthetic to the boxy used cars, Brownsville has the out-of-time feel of a declining industrial town in which nothing has changed since 1987. All of this underlines Sydney’s feelings of suffocation, which manifest in her increasingly violent, uncontrollable outbursts, which make her something like a telekinetic Hulk.

“I Am Not Okay With This” may not surprise you much, but it has charm and voice to spare. And bucking the streaming-TV bloat trend, it runs seven energetic episodes of around twenty minutes apiece. A story about raging hormones and elemental forces, after all, should know the power of a swift explosion.