But I'm not going to lie. Daydream Nation looks awfully pretentious:
I think it's got a couple of triggers for me. The moving stick figure reminds me a little bit too strongly of the unrealized musical notation figures from Idlewild. The soft-focus and music and angst remind me a lot of The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, though I'm guessing that no one undergoes gender reassignment surgery in this movie. And the hot-for-teacher plot bothers me. Movies like this generally default into extremely cliche psychology about why people like that get together, and in this case, it looks like she has a messy, immature breakup with him anyway and ends up with someone much more age-appropriate, which is of course supposed to be the response that proves she's matured and just isn't some hard-to-control little harlot. And is still really, really predictable. I understand that relationships like this are useful shorthand: he's the teacher, she's the student, he's the boss, she's the ambitious underling, she's the tough, sour career girl, he's the player who finds himself attracted. But that shorthand can also function as a straightjacket. Why does the student-teacher relationship have to be a volatile benchmark on the road to maturity for one and ruin for the other?