Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger (ATOM Study Guide)

Hey Hey it's Esther Blueburger is a smart, rueful and dead-on portrait of life's unending quest to fit in … and the girl who solves it by completely breaking out. Esther Blueburger is seeking something far more ambitious, essential and exhilarating – to defy the chaos, unfairness and absurdity of the world with her irresistible and indestructible urge to be herself. Esther Blueburger's (Danielle Catanzariti) quest begins when she escapes from her own Bat-Mitzvah party and is befriended by Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), the effortlessly cool girl who is everything Esther thinks she wants to be. With the help of Sunni, Esther goes AWOL from her ordinary life – secretly busting out of her cold, repressive private school to clandestinely attend Sunni's edgy, forbidden public school as a Swedish exchange student. Esther also leaves behind her blithely malfunctioning nuclear family – her flummoxed mother Grace Blueburger (Essie Davis), her sentimental father Osmond Blueburger (Russell Dykstra) and her mad genius twin brother Jacob Blueburger (Christian Byers) – to hang out with Sunni's far breezier and super-hip single mom Mary (Toni Collette). Esther embraces her masquerade and enthusiastically crosses over into an alternate, new world in which everything in her life has become reversed. Once bullied, Esther is now in charge. Once the reject, Esther dives boldly into sexual experimentation. Once the angelic daughter, Esther defiantly shakes up her bewildered family. But when one of Esther's two very disparate worlds is suddenly shattered, she must find a way to bring together all the conflicting dualities of her life – public and private, real and fantastical, ugly and beautiful, the desire to be cool and the need to be loved – while finally and fully embracing the wonderful weirdness and ecstatic bliss of being Esther Blueburger.