Edie Arnold Is A Loser

Bluesky

One thing about punk that a lot of outsiders miss is that it has always made room for everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like or where you’re from as long as you can play three chords, you have something to say and you’re honest about it. Still... Catholic school girls?

Kade Atwood and Megan Rico’s amiable high school movie, which screened as part of SXSW 2026, ultimately follows a fairly conventional pattern, but it packs in some great tunes and larger than life personalities. The titular Edie (Adi Madden Cabrera) is not the biggest of these, but makes a good central character, ordinary enough for lots of teenagers to relate to and still particular enough to be interesting. A social outcast at Our Lady of Undying Misery high school, where she and her friends are referred to as turds, she has one talent in life, and that’s playing the drums. Of course, all the good musical opportunities go to popular girls, but when she gets dragged to a punk club one night and inadvertently ends up playing there, she’s a sensation. What’s more, she attracts the attention of staff member Iggy (Gabe Root). An inexperienced flirt and keen to impress, she tells him she’s in a band – and then there’s nothing for it but to start one.

Making a band work isn’t easy when your mother gives you a strict curfew, your headmistress thinks punk is Satanic, and you don’t have any instruments. Fortunately the girls get some support from more liberal newcomer Sister Sheena (Luseane Pasa), and Edie manages to blag a key to the store cupboard off Walter (Lucas Van Orden), the boy she stares at in her maths class. Throw in some reworked hymns and the project begins to seem like it might be viable, but naturally there are complications down the road.

The plot here isn’t particularly sophisticated, but there are some great moments, and the filmmakers find clever ways to play with the form. McKenna Tuckett is sensational as Edie’s best friend, Frances, the band’s frontwoman. One hopes she’ll get the chance to use that voice and stage presence again sometime. Cabrera has sufficient acting talent to hold her own, however, and has plenty of material to work with as Edie clashes with her mother and finds herself romantically torn between Iggy and Walter. The latter is an altar boy who only listens to Christian rock – the sort of boy her mother approves of – but his take on living a godly life has more to do with rules than spirit. Iggy, meanwhile, is less sure of himself than people might assume based on his appearance. Which is really the right boy for her? That might come down to respect – including respect for her musical career.

Although the element of romance will be important to many teenage viewers, Atwood and Rico don’t let it dominate the story, and the final act is all about the girls’ first love: music. /If the story seems to be fizzling out at this point, don’t stop paying attention. It’s worth sticking around for a postscript which sticks its stiff little finger somewhere well deserved.

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