American Teen
Not (just) another teen movie.
Dir. Nanette Burstein (M)
By Joshua Rothkopf
"I can't go to school anymore," the girl whispers, shuddering with break-up sobs. Then comes a torrent of tears, her head resting helplessly on a friend's shoulder. You wince, not just at the intimacy of the moment but at her certainty that the world has just ended. It's a scene out of so many teen movies (hell, so many adolescences), but how often does the embarrassment cut so deep? Forget about her ex; she just can't be seen by anyone ever again.
American Teen is, ostensibly, a documentary. That it works so well as a melodrama, better even than The Breakfast Club, raises vexing concerns (if you let it). Has director Nanette Burstein shaped, crafted and jiggered the material over the course of a senior year in red-state, suburban Indiana? Of course she has - like any doc director. Perhaps more troubling is the sneaking suspicion that the teens themselves have become her co-conspirators. Types like Hannah Bailey's arty outsider or Megan Krizmanich's spoiled mean girl exist in every school, but do such perfect rise-and-fall narratives play out naturally as well?
That will be your call, but this ex-teen, for one, remembers them seesawing just so.
The movie has a rare, geeky generosity - a braces-laden, acne-scared adorableness - that sets it apart from the current crop of glamorised gossip girls or reality-TV phonies. Take American Teen for the moving snapshot it is: a picture of an uncertain generation finding its roots. The big basketball game looms, photos of alums killed in the Iraq War sit in a memorial cabinet, and there are dates to be scored.
