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American Teen, the new documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nannette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), made quite a splash at Sundance as well as here at SXSW this year, and for good reason. The film follows five very different high school kids going through the ups and downs of their senior year in Warsaw, Indiana. Make no mistake, any resemblance to the seminal John Hughes film is purely intentional; witness the movie poster’s loving pose-for-pose homage and the extremely hip soundtrack. But hey, if you’re going to emulate a movie, it’s not a bad choice.
The film contains all the typical high school tropes. But here, the characters are real—and we don’t just mean in that their names aren’t made up. The jock only cares about basketball, sure, but it’s because a scholarship is the only way he can afford college; the princess can be bitchy, but she’s under a lot of pressure to get into her father’s Ivy League alma mater; the nerd is actually quite charming, really just a skateboard and a bottle of ProActiv away from being a cute skater boi. In fact, it seems that everyone in this movie is more than a bunch of clichés, and therein lies the elemental beauty of this picture—it’s not just an exploration of “this is how kids are today,” it’s more an exploration of why. In the process of learning about them, we actually start to understand and relate to them.
Which of course, was what Breakfast Club was all about too. But somehow the fact that these are living, breathing people— their email addresses are out there on Facebook—writing their own stories makes every emotion a bit more poignant by reminding us more of ourselves. After all, there are no beautiful movie actors playing the parts in this one.
Burstein has mastered her style; the picture has a great sense of pace and timing, and it allows the school year to progress casually, building tension slowly as report cards arrive and relationships begin (and end), culminating in such epic events as Prom and the Big Game, as well as the requisite madness that follows each. It’s hard not to relate to one (if not all) of these high school archetypes as they become actual three-dimensional characters before our very eyes. If you don’t end up holding your breath at the “where are they now” updates, you were probably home-schooled.
American Teen is fun—something that can’t be said for every documentary out there, but that’s not to say it doesn’t reach out and touch you as well, peeling back all the years of “growing up” you’ve done, and reminding you of what you used to be. We’re betting it will inspire a trip to the attic to find the old yearbook and tell everyone which Breakfast Club character you were. Hey, maybe it’s time to come clean and admit that you were more Anthony Michael Hall than Judd Nelson, and that Molly Ringwald never even knew you were alive.
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