Hey all. Capone in Chicago here. High-profile documentaries tend to vanish from the radar during the summer, but this year I feel like I've been seeing at least one new one every week. That said, last May I got my first look at a doc that has been wowing audiences young and old since Sundance. And now, just as the new school year is about to begin, my favorite documentary of the summer is finally hitting theaters. Director Nanette Burstein (ON THE ROPES; THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) has crafted AMERICAN TEEN, a look at a year in the life of five high school seniors (I believe the school they attend is in Indiana), each representing a different stratum of the teen experience. The resulting film is one of the most fascinating and honest portraits of life in and out of school with all the requisite pressures, heartbreaks, petty conflicts and rivalries that often define the adults we become. Although each of the five kids profiled is interesting in their own way, the audience favorite seems to be lovely and spirited Hannah Bailey, clearly destined for things outside of her small Indiana town. Hannah is something of an outcast, who spends much of the first half of the film in a deep depression when her long-time boyfriend unceremoniously dumps her. After getting back into the flow of school after a long absence, Hannah swears off relationships until she meets the unfairly (to me) handsome Mitch, who just happens to be one of Burstein's five subjects. Mitch notices Hannah for the first time performing at a school talent show, and he sweeps her off her feet with an ease that will make every male in the audience envious. Mitch plays basketball with Colin, the team's star player whose Elvis impersonator father says that if Mitch doesn't get a college basketball scholarship (the family can't afford to send him to college), he'll probably end up going into the Army. The fourth student subject is Megan, a driven, smart and popular girl who comes from money and has a mean streak when she feels someone has crossed her. An incident caught on camera that starts out as a simple toilet papering of a house and turns into vandalism as Megan scrawls "fag" on a window, gives us some insight into her troubled mind. Hannah may have been the girl I would have attempted to date in high school (and maybe even today…ahem), but Megan is the person most worthy of deep psychological examination. Without giving anything away here, director Burstein deliberately withholds some information about her past and upbringing that doesn't excuse her behavior but does go a long way toward explaining it. Most mean girls didn't start out that way. The true outcast of the group (and the only student who doesn't really float in the circle that the other four do) is Jake, the grippingly introverted "geek" with bad skin, who is one of the funniest of the bunch, but who has very few social skills. He does manage to find a girlfriend at one point during the film, but she's someone new to the school, and once she makes new and less awkward friends, she cuts Jake loose with little fanfare. Burstein isn't necessarily attempting to capture every cross section of this or any public high school (the fact that there are two jocks in her cast is evidence enough of that), but she still manages to avoid trivializing the emotional ups and downs of teenagers. In our world of surface-level reality shows, it's genuinely refreshing to see a director attempt to capture not only the highs and lows of the high school experience, but also the everyday. Still, would it have killed the director to selected a handsome high school newspaper editor/film critic who longs for the day when he can move to a big city and guide the general public toward the best in cinema, and then marry his high school sweetheart, Hannah? Apparently such creatures only exist in fiction films—horror stories, in particular. The truest test of any film like American Teen is that I didn't want it to stop; I wanted to know where these lives went from here. We do get a short postscript about each subject at the end of the film, and the kids have spent a great deal of the summer touring the country in support of the film, so that fills in many of the gaps. But the truth is, I'd like to know where these five end up in 5 or 10 years, and that's simply because Burstein made me care about each one of these kids, who are both ordinary and extraordinary in so many ways. AMERICAN TEEN will capture a special place in your heart. The truest testament to any film like this is that I want to know what happens to these five individuals (having just met them this last week helped me catch up on their lives). This film made me care about five strangers, and that's a powerful accomplihment. --Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
