20 Essential Coming Of Age Movies That Changed Your Life

14. Garden State

The characters in Zach Braff's 2004 drama Garden State seem to have a much harder time of it than most of the other characters featured on this list so far. For them, coming-of-age means coming to terms with mortality and severe emotional problems - their lives are fractured and incomplete, and their search for meaning vague and seemingly unobtainable. Braff plays Andrew Largeman, a struggling actor who plies himself with psychoactive medication in order to subsume the guilt he felt for paralysing his mother in an accident as a child. The drugs have left him incapable of feeling or expressing emotions, and the other characters in the movie are equally damaged; not least habitual liar Sam (Natalie Portman). Garden State has justly earned its cult following, and despite the existential themes which run throughout it ends on an optimistic note, as Andrew snaps out of his fugue state and becomes the architect of his fate.