There’s nothing novel or new about “Edge of Everything.” But for half a century, every generation has needed its cinematic essay on growing up in a heedless rush.

Comedy or tragedy, cartoonish or cautionary, “Sixteen Candles” or “thirteen,” “Edge of Seventeen,” or “Kids,” film audiences are forever getting updates on “kids these days,” what they’re into and what might shock parents and those far removed from parenting about how “early” they’re “growing up.”

This Marin County coming-of-age drama is about a 14 year-old freshman, Abby, who loses her mother, comes to live with her Dad and his much-younger girlfriend and kind of goes off the rails as she falls under the influence of kids with less supervision, whose parents failed to warn them away from the dangerous pitfalls of that age.

It’s almost quaint in its genre conventionality, as nothing here has even a hint of “shocking” about it. It’s not timely or topical enough to wrestle with this generation’s gender fluidity fixation, for instance. But good performances by the teens, especially star Sierra McCormick, and a few good scenes about parenting in a “follow your bliss” self-absorbed era almost recommend it.

McCormick, of “The Vast of Night” and “VFW,” in her mid-20s and thus a bit mature to be playing fourteen-going-on-fifteen, is Abby, who has just lost her mother as we meet her. She’s safeguarding her Mom’s last voice mails, taking care as she moves her goldfish to her father’s house and soldiering through a Jewish funeral where the more outspoken relatives are muttering their contempt for her Dad (Jason Butler Harner of “Ozark”), who left her mom for a succession of younger women, the latest of whom, Leslie (Sabina Friedman-Seitz) lives with him.

Abby and Leslie engage in a simmering undeclared war of judgements, lies and insults. Abby starts acting-out by stealing from Leslie.

She’s trying to keep her distance from her dad, who we gather hasn’t been “there” for her in years. At least she’s got her classmates, Lena, Hannah and Sarah (Nadezhda Amé, Dominique Gayle and Emily Robinson), to keep her ninth grade moorings. Or so one would hope.

But Abby’s experiments begin with Youtubing how to make a bong out of an apple, buying pot and kind of nudging her still-kids besties to experiment with her. When they prove slow on the uptake, the wild child Caroline (Ryan Simpkins) grabs her attention in their favorite pizza joint. An unrestrained rebel who talks back to adults, she keeps clear liquor in a disposable water bottle and her eyes peeled for that next buzz, prank or boy to cross her field of view.

Abby is fascinated and more than willing to show how “cool” she is to her friends by taking up with out-of-control Caroline and joining in her partying, tipsy navel piercing or sex with older boys.

Actually, Abby is more on the sidelines for that last “You need to lose your virginity” benchmark. But everything else tangles up her emotions and misdirects her moral compass, wrecking relationships and causing her inexperienced-at-parenting father to resort to at-home drug-tests to rein her in.

Movies like this lose points, in my mind, by presenting a version of coming-of-age as seen through a California “growing up fast” distortion field. “Edge” is an indie film with a “Hollywood parenting” and “coming of age younger than ever” subtext. It’s conventional and myopic in its West Coast cinematic “Everybody parents this way” biases, indulging their kids, cursing or drinking in front of them (in many movies, not this one) normalization.

It’s inherently more interesting to see how small town kids or inner city anywhere-but-Cali kids — Latino or white, Black or Asian — go through this than yet another endorsement of of privileged parental permissiveness and libidinous indulgence from the ahead-of-the-curve West Coast.

Young filmmakers and film school alumni live in a bubble that’s too-often reflected in the stories they tell and the worlds they’re most comfortable showing.

Co-writers/directors Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman may not have much new to show us about “growing up too fast.” But they script a couple of lovely scenes about a father admitting to his kid his parenting shortcomings, or a barely-a-teen grasping something she’s noticed about her friends and the adults all around them.

“We just kinda get sadder and sadder as we get older and slowly lose everything.”

You see enough of these movies and you get a bit jaded. Even the title seems derivative. But for those young enough to have missed generations of this sort of story, “Edge of Everything” hits the right notes, even if they come at exactly the moments we expect them to.

Rating: teen drug abuse, drinking, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jason Butler Harner, Ryan Simpkins, Dominique Gayle, Emily Robinson,
Nadezhda Amé and Anthony Del Negro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman. A Lightyear release.

Running time: 1:22