American Teen

And so the queen of the Sundance prom comes to DVD. Director Nanette Burstein, winner of the 2008 fest’s documentary directing award, told the New York Post of her inspired American Teen flick, “All the wonderful and horrible experiences of being 17, the feeling of being utterly lost, is the same as it ever was.” In the words of Blink-182, a band now as nostalgic as high school, “I guess this is growing up.” I wanted to dislike this documentary, American Teen, but that’s damn near impossible. It’s so human.

Full disclosure right now: I hail from the same hometown – Warsaw, Indiana; population circa 14,000 – as the film’s stars. The idea of any small-scale celeb coming out of Warsaw is itself peculiar. We don’t have those, or we didn’t. But with Teen the younger siblings of some of my own classmates, fellows with whom I played the trombone and then tennis, became bona fide Sundance darlings.

American Teen depicts the everyday lives of five seniors at this 2,000-strong secondary school. The Oscar-nominated Burstein (On the Ropes) reportedly shot 20 students’ lives during their 2005-06 year. Culling from 1,200 hours of footage, Burstein ultimately funneled four to five initially archetypal kids into her tale.

There’s Colin, the huckster basketball star abiding comfortably (and yet not – thanks, Pops!) in Hoosiers land. His pal Mitch plays secondary jock and walk-on loverboy. Then there’s the most compelling (or at least emoting) trio: Hannah, a resilient Ally Sheedy-channeling art lover; Megan, the hyper-blonde, cutthroat achiever; and Jake, a Zelda-smitten, acne-addled band geek who persistently looks for love in all the wrong places.

To be fair, when it came to high school, who didn’t? Therein lies half of this film’s allure. Hannah and Jake have more than a handle on heartbreak over these unkind months. (As is the high school way, some of that searing is certainly self-inflicted. Lest we forget, the word “emo” backwards spells “O, me.”)

Colin’s ultimatum-happy father (an Elvis impersonator, no joke) levels scholarship-or-Army pressure on his spawn. The man’s shooting hoops through his son, vicariously, even though it seems a bit forced. At the same time Megan and friends drink and plot at her family’s tony brick home, Hannah’s holed up with her (prom-scene-stealing) grandma, her father gone to Ohio for a job and her mother a manic-depressive case.

Recalling another high school saga, Orange County now, “Every good writer has a conflicted relationship with the place where he grew up.” Sub in “artist” for “writer,” and that’s Hannah. She dismisses Warsaw as “mostly white, mostly Christian, red state all the way” – and, while the presidential election’s already nixed that crit, the stage is set.

Would you believe it, these kids hold hands and stab backs, flirt online and wobble in person. One incites a riot by forwarding an e-mailed photo “for his eyes only.” Another breaks off a relationship via text message. One Erica makes a cameo as a classmate cruelly maligned for her attempt to (what else?) keep a boy’s attention. Perhaps she suffers worst here, that best-laid plan blowing back in her genuinely teary face. Her direct-address scene is brief but touching.

The trademark (stale?) jock, geek, princess, heartthrob, and rebel roles don’t take long to flesh out into warm-blooded 17-year-olds, and therein lies the film’s triumph. It’s a winner for how it shows, not tells, how awful and chock-full of all kinds of pressures and pains those teen years truly can be. In this it succeeds wildly.

Hannah, the arguable lead here, is sort of a real-life Juno MacGuff (sans baby kicks). She’s lightning-witted and articulate and gazing at San Fran from afar. Will she get there? Megan’s matriarch of the local Mean Girls chapter (“I’ve always owned this school”), slaying both student-council and romantic rivals with malicious glee. Shameless and mean, she makes for one of the best teen-movie villains ever, and that because, well, she’s real. It’s late in the film that a tragedy marks her and her loved ones as no less human than the rest.

Hannah for one seeks to break out of her parents’ crippling, narrow mindset. At the same time Megan looks to live up to and honor her family’s storied past of attending Notre Dame. Even the girls’ respective rides speak to dueling socio-economic statuses involved here: Hannah drives a weathered two-seat droptop while Megan, a doctor’s daughter, cruises in her burgundy Benz SUV.

Voiced-over animated sequences for each teen thread through the film. These treatments might seem precious, but the voice-and-image juxtaposition of Megan’s idealism induces chuckles while Hannah’s piece startles. The Tim Burton-esque clip centers on her fractured family life and depression.

The film is hardly perfect. Two or three scenes come across as staged (I’ll let you discern which those are), and the grin-milking Mitch is one-dimensional for his prominent placement. Maybe he exists here to remind us of a clique’s powerful tug to return to the fold. Then the requisite prom scene – this is a teen movie, after all – leads to one last tragicomic tear. (My brother, returning to dole out the previous year’s kingly crown, alleged that the outcome was rigged.) Clark, Hannah’s squirrelly best bud, is compelling but underserved (I’ve no link to this kid); his minty prom tux certainly wins best dressed in this reviewer’s yearbook. Last, there’s the disservice of Jake’s story ducking down to Mexico in a lame digression involving his older brother (read: my trombone-line leader). Thankfully Jake’s prom date flies in to deliver one of this doc’s benchmark lines: “You can accomplish amazing things. You lived through high school.”

Indeed, this senior year is “the final odor,” in the words of Megan’s graduation speech. What makes the most sense about these kids’ lives is the way each is the product of parents. Their progenitors’ personalities and ways all too often pierce the light these kids often want to let out: “You’re not special!” Hannah’s mother barks at her before her daughter later retorts, “It’s not your life!” One of Megan’s many pranks results in a slap on the wrist (say, does family money trump discipline?), for which her father chastises her, “[It’s] more stupid if you can’t do it and not get caught.” Ah, yes – ye olde trickle-down effect, the sins of the fathers and mothers reaped on the young.

This soundtrack-tastic docu-dramedy may seem girl-heavy, but it’s the winsome, pizza-faced Jake who brings the bulk of its zingers. To his semiformal dinner date: “I thought it’d be fun to ask you last minute. We have a lot of same interests, we both suck at life.” In an excruciating deleted scene at a front door (aye, to kiss or not to kiss?), he informs that same hapless girl, “Your face smells like makeup, and mine smells like zit cream.” A second is a purgatory when you’re either afraid to kiss or subtly begging for it. Aside from this prolonged charade, ripe with real-time quips and cadence, and some endearing video-blogging from Hannah, the special features aren’t quite so.

So Jake’s naïve outlook on relationships – he falls in like at the drop of a marching helmet – leads him to fantasize about going away to college and becoming a muscled love hunk. He dares the cynic inside each one of us to tell him he can’t dream, that he can’t reinvent himself at university. Didn’t we all?

A friend told me recently that his own verge-of-graduation theme song (this will date us) was Tori Amos’s “Winter”: “’Cause things are gonna change so fast/ All the white horses have gone ahead/ I tell you I’ll always want you near, you say that things change, my dear.” Egad, those changes. Insider info has it that Warsaw High’s principal has since been ousted, and its beloved sub-pub arcade torched. Nothing stays the same, and these kids are well aware. Each gets a fitting epilogue, and it’s then you realize for whom you’ve been rooting. In the end it was all of them, another victory of Burstein’s film.

Dear Hannah tells Burstein’s camera at one point, “I want to make movies that people will remember forever.” Her recent true-life internship with Judd “Superbad” Apatow notwithstanding, she may yet do so. Or it could be that she has already.

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