Superbad is seventeen years old and still the standard against which teen comedies are measured. This is partly because Jonah Hill and Michael Cera’s friendship onscreen feels genuinely real, partly because it is extremely funny, and partly because underneath all the panic about sex and alcohol, it is actually a film about the terror of growing up and leaving someone behind.

Seth and Evan are about to graduate and go to different colleges. Seth (Hill) is loud and desperate and terrified. Evan (Cera) is quiet and careful and moving on. Neither has said this to the other, and the film’s party-quest plot, get alcohol, go to party, connect with the girls they like, is really about the two of them circling something they cannot articulate.

The Fogell/McLovin subplot, involving two genuinely unhinged police officers played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen, threatens to capsize the film several times and somehow makes it better each time. Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Fogell is one of the best comedy debuts in recent memory.

Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen wrote this script when they were teenagers, and it shows in the best possible way. The specificity of the dialogue, the particular wrongness of how teenage boys talk when they think they are alone, feels completely authentic.

The film’s final scene, the morning after, Seth and Evan saying goodbye in a mall, is genuinely touching. It knows what it has been about all along, even when it was being loudly, cheerfully, spectacularly inappropriate.