Five iconic coming-of-age car films

For teenagers in films, cars have always been a symbol for getting around, playing up, making out – and everything in between. Here are five of our favourite films.

American Graffiti (1973)

Before he was cast as Han Solo, Harrison Ford worked with George Lucas on American Graffiti, a film that encapsulated the car culture of the early 1960s and the way it contributed to the early years of the American teenager. Alongside Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss, Ford was a drag-racin’, fast-talkin’ teen in a small town where everyone about to head off to college was feeling disaffected and in need of distraction in the form of four wheels.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

As well as pigeonholing Matthew McConaughey as the slack-jawed Texan for the rest of his career (it’s where his signature “Alright, alright, alright” was coined!), Dazed and Confused shows how all the different cliques come together the night after the seniors finish school forever. It doesn’t matter where you sat on the popularity ladder at school: if you can drive to the old Moontower, you’re invited to the party. Muscle cars are the great equaliser in this Richard Linklater film.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

It was a scene that must’ve sent waves of horror through the parents of teenagers in the 1950s. James Dean plays Jim, who is pressured, by a bullying gang leader, into a ‘Chickie-Run’ that backfires spectacularly. The fiery explosion was a symbol of everything that was brewing and stewing inside Jim, his crush Judy and his friend Plato as they came up against the failings of their parents and the pressures of a society that didn’t have their backs.

20th Century Women (2016)

This story about single mother Dorothea raising her teenage son, Jamie, with the help of their close friends and houseguests was inspired by director Mike Mills’s childhood in Southern California – and it opens with the immolation of Dorothea’s ex-husband’s Ford Galaxie 500 in a supermarket car park. While Jamie spends most of the film cruising down tree-lined roads on his skateboard, it’s inside Dorothea’s VW Beetle, William’s Chevrolet Styleline and their beat-up old sedan that he figures out who he is going to be in the 20th century.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

The biggest ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ on screen in the late ’80s wasn’t Sam and Diane on Cheers, but Ferris, Cameron and Sloane – will they get eviscerated by Cameron’s dad for freewheeling around Chicago in his prized Ferrari Modena Spyder California, or will everything work out okay in the end? Whether you buy into the ‘Ferris was just a figment of Cameron’s imagination’ theory or not, we all definitely dreamed of having a friend like Ferris to pull us out of the deepest teen funk and force us to see the world a little differently.

Related: Five famous films featuring Ferraris

Related: Top five movie getaway cars

Related: The five best cars from the Fast and the Furious film franchise