Can't Buy Me Love (1987)

Here is a film that begins with a receipt. Ronald Miller, a suburban Tucson teenager with a telescope fund and no social capital, pays a cheerleader one thousand dollars to pretend to love him for a month, and the picture treats the arrangement as a fair market transaction rather than a cry for help. It is 1987, and the teen comedy is still permitted to be cynical without apology. The title is borrowed from the Beatles. The movie has less on its mind than the song.

On the matter of representation, the cast is a monochrome parade of Arizona suburbs, and nobody involved appears to have noticed. An African dance sequence, absorbed from public television and deployed at a school dance, becomes a punchline that becomes a trend, which is its own small comment on cultural borrowing. Cindy reads poetry and fixes Ronald's hair, granting her a flicker of interiority before the plot returns her to the position of a rented accessory. The makeover arc rewards conventional beauty and nothing else. The nerd, meanwhile, is a social category, not a diagnosis, so the neurodivergence ledger stays empty.

The closing lunchroom speech about the pointlessness of school tribalism arrives as a mild sermon, and the crowd applauds, as crowds do. This is a moral about friendship, delivered with the urgency of a homeroom announcement. The film wants to say that popularity is hollow. It says so gently, then hands its hero the girl and a lawnmower. We are left with a competent, faintly sour little comedy that mistakes a transaction for a romance. It is charming in the way a signed receipt is charming.