Anyone who remembers their own adolescence accurately will understand exactly what I mean when I say I am genuinely glad to have watched first-time writer-director Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade,” but I do not think I have the fortitude to watch it ever again.

I’m more than old enough to be the father of Kayla Day, the eighth-grader played by Elsie Fisher, whom we see going through her final week of middle school, and yet, the awkwardness of her attempted interactions with her fellow teens was so uncomfortably authentic it put me into a full-body cringe for the entire length of the film.

Beyond capturing the anxieties that are so universal to every set of 13-year-olds, I felt like I was reliving them by watching them on screen, Burnham also underscores the ordeals unique to this generation, from the oppressive presence of social media in their personal lives, to the way school shootings are simply another routine drill for students, as expected and ordinary as fire alarms.

Thanks to Burnham’s narrative and Fisher’s performance, it’s impossible not to empathize intensely with Kayla, for whom every attempt to connect with her peers, and to embody the advice on self-confidence that she dispenses on her all-but-unwatched YouTube channel, feels like running a gauntlet.

Kayla is fortunate enough not to experience any overt bullying, and she has a divorced dad (Josh Hamilton) who goes out of his way to make her feel loved, even if he’s embarrassingly out-of-touch in how he goes about it, but what Burnham captures is the whole set of self-esteem eroders exclusive to growing up as a girl.

I may have spent my middle-school years as a punching bag for other boys who were bigger than me (which was pretty much all of them), but there’s an even deeper cruelty in the casual, often gaslighting ways in which boys pressure Kayla for sex, and other girls cast silent judgement upon her.

Fisher inhabits the character of Kayla flawlessly, lending the film as a whole an almost documentary feel, to the point that I found myself holding my breath whenever she grew tense, or was clearly expecting the other shoe to drop, in the midst of a situation that seemed too good to be true.

Fortunately, Kayla is given some victories, as she befriends both an earnestly kind-hearted high school senior, Olivia (Emily Robinson), and an outgoing boy her age, Gabe (Jake Ryan), who turns out to be on her same endearingly dorky wavelength, which allows her week to close on a hopeful note.

Just as Kayla and her eighth-grade peers are forced to sit through videos on puberty narrated by adults attempting onerously “hip” slang, I’d go so far as to say that a movie like “Eighth Grade” should be mandatory viewing for the parents of any girl, just so they know how rough that ride can get.

Just as eighth-grade Kayla records a time-capsule video for her future self, wishing her the best even as she acknowledges that she probably has some more struggles ahead of her, I look forward to seeing the future acting performances of Elsie Fisher with high hopes of my own.