As docos go, this one’s about as gritty as your average episode of Dawson’s Creek. The people in it are all white, middle class, eloquent-ish suburbanites – real life Juno MacGuffs and Jim Levensteins living in relatively affluent Warsaw, Indiana. There are no black kids. There’s no great poverty. One girl has to live with her Gran because of her mother’s manic depression but elsewhere most of the family support networks are intact.
So, the prospect of this may sound a bit syrupy and superficial for some people’s tastes, but Nanette Burstein’s film is actually a quite charming experience. This may not be about the true hardship of life in the gutter but it really captures the small stuff that feels so big – first loves, break-ups, college decisions and that feeling of complete loneliness that comes with acne, or social awkwardness, or a really crap haircut.
You do have to suspend your disbelief a little to truly get into this. While it’s clear this wasn’t supposed to be ‘earthy’ – Burstein uses cool animation sequences to illustrate the protagonists passions and dreams, for instance – there are moments that if not staged for the cameras, must surely have been influenced by their presence. Occasionally these are so close to movie cliche it’s hard to believe it wasn’t all a set up (the director has been forced to deny as much).
But if you just sit back and enjoy it, American Teen has much to offer. It’s no Hoop Dreams (superb 1994 high school basketball doc) but it is fun, engaging and very well put together. One more word of advice: don’t rush out when the credits roll or you’ll miss how it all turned out. And by then, you actually will care.
