Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

Some Kind of Wonderful arrives in 1987 as John Hughes retelling his own Pretty in Pink with the sexes reversed, a decision history has recorded without much ceremony. The film sets itself against the rigid social order of a San Pedro high school, where blue-collar Keith Nelson works on cars and dreams of painting, and where the popular Amanda Jones dates a wealthy snob named Hardy Jenns. The machinery is familiar. The question, as Roger Ebert noticed at the time, is not whether the hero gets the girl but whether he should, which is a modest and genuine refinement of the form.

Mary Stuart Masterson's Watts, a tomboy drummer who dresses in menswear and sneers at the prom, offers the film's most interesting cultural friction. She resists the conventional presentation of teen femininity, and Amanda is granted an interior life beyond her cheerleader archetype. Yet the plot still arranges itself around which young woman the male protagonist selects, which keeps the whole enterprise tethered to a very old arrangement. The class conflict is present and pronounced, with the wealthy Hardy as villain and the working-class Keith as hero, though the critique lands on individual cruelty instead of the structures that produce it.

Elsewhere there is very little to report. The cast is white almost without exception, and race never enters the frame as a subject. There is no environmental concern, no bodily politics, no neurodivergent character, no historical revision, no queer subtext. The film delivers its lessons about class and self-discovery through character drama, which is to say it refrains from sermonizing. It is a pleasant, well-made teen picture from a decade that produced many, and its progressive credentials are those of a thoughtful mainstream comedy and nothing more.