We Are The Best! is a film to prove that life, despite all evidence to the contrary, is worth living.

Stockholm, circa 1982, finds smart and serious Bobo (Mira Barkhammer), and mouthy and confident Klara (Mira Grosin), mooning around the outskirts of the social hierarchy at school.

They are outsider girls, sporting pixie cuts and mohawks to the mockery of all the blonde, pastel wearing ‘normal’ girls who tell them time and again, with that pitying look kids in their early teens do so well, that punk is dead.

Bobo and Klara disagree.

Together they form a punk rock band, despite being unable to play any instruments, and pressure the musically talented yet tragically Christian Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) to join them.

They are outsiders, they are thirteen and they are the best!

Directed by Lukas Moodysson, the giant of Show Me Love, Together and Lilya-4-Ever, and adapted from the graphic novel Never Goodnight by his wife Coco, We Are The Best! is an episodic tale of adolescent friendship that starts with a bang and never lets up.

This is no School of Rock, this is so much better, so much more. Even the closing credits are energetic.

Our unlikely trio don’t morph into an accomplished band and kill it at the competition in the grand finale as, like most kids, they have neither the talent nor the ambition for this.

No, We Are The Best! is a film where things just happen, much as they do in life. Everything just rolls forward, and keeps on rolling.

The girls play, they fight, they argue with their parents, they argue with each other, they start to look at boys.

All the while they make up a song inspired by their insipid gym classes, Hate the Sport!, and get better at playing this together.

Among Moodysson’s many talents is his ability to elevate the normal, even the banal, to the poetic and deeply meaningful.

We Are The Best! captures that exuberance, hope, confidence, fear and strain towards imagined adult persona’s that is a universal experience for everyone who ever remembers what it was like to be a teenager; when those highs of friendship are so dizzying that they made you drunk before you ever knew what alcohol tasted like.

And the lows were so crushing it was like living through Armageddon.

We Are The Best! makes you feel all of this.

Featuring a banging soundtrack of Scandi Punk tunes and original song writing, from acts like Brezhnev and Reagan F**k off!, We Are The Best! is tonnes of fun, incredibly moving and even manages to capture Stockholm of the eighties in exquisite visually and audio detail.

This is a movie for anyone who is, will be and once upon a time was 13. Because after all, when you’re in the world’s greatest band, what could you possibly have to be sad about?

EJ Robinson