This book brings theory from popular music studies to an examination of identity and agency in youth films while building on, and complementing, film studies literature concerned with genre, identity, and representation. McNelis includes case studies of Hollywood and independent US youth films that have had commercial and/or critical success to illustrate how films draw on specific discourses surrounding popular music genres to convey ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. He develops the concept of 'musical agency', a term he uses to discuss the...

This book examines a popular, divisive, and celebrity-endorsed filmic depiction of a troubled African American girl, focusing on the concept of African American youth film and genre hybridity; the adaptation of the film from its source novel; how it deals with issues of identity such as race, gender, and body size; the film's use of music and pop stars as spectacle; and how the film's critical reception brought back, and moved beyond, the old debates around positive representation of race.