Maybe kids are just adept at packaging themselves nowadays—I’m
sure these Indiana high-school students all had their own MySpace
pages—but I have never seen a more colorful pack of stereotypes
in a nonfiction film. American Teen traces a year in the lives
of actual teenagers: Megan is a brat with a cruel streak; Colin is a
nice-guy jock; Jake is a cripplingly shy band nerd. Director Nanette
Burstein clearly identifies with Hannah, an adorable wannabe filmmaker.
They’re all trapped in the smallish town of Warsaw for the time being,
and they’re all unhappy about it. Except for a heartthrob named Mitch,
that is. His friends are pressuring him not to date Hannah, who isn’t
part of his social circle—but he doesn’t seem very torn up about
the decision either way. For Hannah, on the other hand, their breakup
is catastrophic.
The teens’ senior-year dramas are so carefully condensed that entire
conversations sound scripted. All the rough edges of personalities have
been sanded down until each act of mischief or retreat into depression
can be traced to a certain cause. Anyone who has seen MTV’s The Real
World knows it isn’t so hard to sift through nonfiction until it
acquires the gloss of untruth. The real question isn’t whether scenes
were staged, but why Burstein wanted them to look as though they
were.
American Teen is slick and snappy, and it’s easy to get
engrossed in the narrative. But it’s also just as easy to forget it
ever happened. When updates on the teens’ lives rolled just before the
closing credits, I found myself hoping something bizarre had happened
to one of them, just to see the edifice buckle a bit. No such
luck—they’re all doing precisely what you’d expect. American
Teen succeeds in being exactly as crisp, entertaining, and useless
as a romantic comedy.
