Review - American Teen

American high school is one of the scariest concepts imaginable to people from Europe (and I believe to many Americans as well). The caste system, the humiliating lunch incidents, the horrors of the vote for homecoming queen, all of this is both reassuringly alien and frighteningly familiar to the generations brought up on American-dominated popular culture. And while the idea of attending one of these neurosis factories is repulsive, watching people doing just that is endlessly fascinating.

Everyone knows that The Breakfast Club is one of the best high school films ever and reveals deep truths about this shallow institution, as well as adolescence more generally. However, that doesn’t mean that all teenagers fit one of the archetypes featured in it (a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal). The director Nanette Burstein has decided to ignore this and make a documentary that chooses real people based on their resemblance to the characters in that film.

American Teen follows four students at Warsaw Community High School in Indiana in their senior year. There’s Megan the queen bee, Jake the nerd, Colin the jock and Hannah the misfit. Each one leads very separate lives filled with pressure, either from their parents or from themselves. There are smiles and tears as they decide their future and deal with all the issues you’d expect to see in an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210 or Saved by the Bell. Some of the storylines are so perfect and well filmed that it is difficult to believe there’s no script.

The people are engaging and their stories are compelling, but the film did not produce the emotion in me that I thought it would. The closest it gets is with Hannah, a pretty, funny and creative girl who becomes depressed. You just want to hug her and tell her that everything will be ok and that she isn’t worthless.

It is very interesting to see the reality of the high school experience up close and to find out where everyone ends up. I just wish that less was made of the The Breakfast Club connection in the marketing of the film. It annoys me that a relatively minor player in proceedings has been given a starring role in posters and the end credits just to fill in for Judd Nelson’s character. It lacks integrity, something that a documentaries normally have buckets of.