This teenage-summer movie, in which director Paul Williams (then 23 years old) and actor Jon Voight both make their debuts, is the first of a Williams trilogy about the Sixties generation (it was followed by The Revolutionary and Dealing). Even if you never heard of it, Out Of It received universally positive reviews, like this in Sight and Sound:
“In contrast (to The Graduate and Wild In The Streets), Out Of It...seems a genuine attempt to tell it like it is, or at any rate like it was. Shot in 41 days on a relatively small budget, it concerns the efforts of Paul Green, a suburban high school boy in his Junior year, to become a part of the cool world in which he only half believes. To some extent, the character (played dead-pan by Barry Gordon from A Thousand Clowns) is equally a victim of the swinging teenage myth and of the nascent intellectual aspirations that make him critical as well as jealous of the school's two or three integrated swingers. He wishes he could look like them and act as unselfconsciously, yet simultaneously pities them the sterility of their future lives. Williams' film has several real merits - not least among them that it attributes adolescent problems to adolescent characters and fairly consistently maintains the dichotomy between mythical and flesh and blood teenagers.”