Rebel without a Cause (Vildt Blod) 1955 by Nicholas Ray

Rays film starring James Dean and probably synonym with him still after 50 years has a lot to offer. The film is telling the eternal story of coming of age and being almost nihilistic and certainly depressed by the new status and the changed relations with everybody especially parents and friends.

Jim (Jamie) has just moved to a new town with his parents and grandmother. The family has had a vagrant life because of James problems matching friends and schools and "behave properly". The film reveals that it is merely the parental conflicts and the low self-esteem of the father and mother that is the problem. Both have trouble with their roles and what they want from life. The father struggle to be a good model for James but he can't soft and conflict averse as he is. He is suppressed by his wife who on the other hand is desperately longing for some challenge.

An advantage of the film is that the parents are so varied depicted. They are not totally good nor do bad and liberating free of too much moralizing. Indeed all the adult characters of the film seem to moralize very little.
There is quite a contemporary, "modern" understanding of the youth except maybe from Judy's (Nathalie Wood) parents who seem to be rather rigid and afraid of closeness and physical contact.

The youth divides into two groups: Plato, Judy and Jim who are all outsiders and unwilling or unable to coop with "normality". Plato is really abandoned by his parents and only an old nanny cares for him in the big manor-house of his family where he lives. Plato by his death symbolically giving way for the breakaway from the parents and the establishment of maybe an adult and sexual relationship between Jim and Judy at the end.
The other group is a kind of "wild young ones" young guys and girls with the right attitude and a passion for car race. The car races become fatal and in at way sadly anticipate the dead of James Dean some years later.

An ironic scene in a planetarium expresses at the same time the relation between mans eternal struggle for belonging in the world, being somebody not just a non significant nobody and the ignorance of (some) adult people, that is the institutions: Law, parents, teachers etc. According to the universe and its infinity, the teacher says, the problems of human beings seem to fade and be unimportant.
But exactly every young boy and girl in the class visiting the planetarium, every human being consider the way of "being" and "belonging" very important. Here the film offers a non nihilistic outlook on life.