AMERICAN TEEN

Directed By Nanette Burstein

Review By Jody Newman

A Brain, a Beauty, a Jock, a Rebel, and a Recluse … ahh, the beauty of The Breakfast Club, that classic John Hughes opus that defined High School for so many kids of the beloved Generation X.  But here’s the thing: in this modern-day world of DirecTV, The Hills, and Instant Messaging, what could define High School life for today’s teen? Would you be surprised if I said The Breakfast Club still?  Yeah, I would be too. But how about if I pitched an alternative flick? The Breakfast Club meets Laguna Beach, perhaps? Well, if that is more to your liking than you better get in line now for the joys that is American Teen.

Brace yourself film watchers, because there is no way that you are going to avoid the onslaught of media that will accompany the release of American Teen, the 2008 indie-doc that stole the hearts of Festival-goers from Sundance to Philly. Recently secured for distribution by Paramount Vantage, American Teen is coming to a theater near you … and soon. 

But is this a good thing?

Can our pop-culture obsessed world take a cast of more ‘Lauren Conrads’ and ‘Spencer Pratts’? Can we be expected to pay money to sit back and watch ‘life’ for two hours when we can get our fix of Reality teens every night on basic cable? What will be next, then? Dancing With The Stars II: Electric Pas-De-Deux?

The answer is to this question is a most definite ‘yes’. You see, what separates American Teen’s teens from those … others (I’ll be polite) is that their fears, experiences, and goals are ours as well. These are intelligent, likable, ambitious, and flawed people who ultimately allow us to realize, like Hughes did in 1985, that as different as we all appear to be, we are more alike than we know. Here is a picture that works for so many demographics. It plays well with a young audience (which was evident at the Ford Ampitheater’s screening) as well as with an older audience, who can realize that today’s teenagers are not so fundamentally different than they were years before … they only have better gadgets to play with!

Director Nanette Burstein, who until this film was best known for directing The Kid Stays in the Picture, assembles remarkable footage that documents the lives of several seniors at a small Indiana town high school from the first day of their last year of public education until Graduation Day. Infusing documentary footage with animation to visualize her subjects’ flights-of-fancy, Teen is fresh, inventive, and inspiring.  And keep your eye on the aspiring filmmaker Hannah Bailey, who after just her first three minutes of screen time, steals your heart, makes you smile, and forces you to think of her as your new best friend. God bless her little heart, that girl is going places. Just like you should be going to see American Teen. (Okay, I stretched for that ending. But if I didn’t wrap it up here, I could have gone on all night!)