In 2005, five high school seniors agreed to open every facet of their lives to our country’s prying eyes. Perhaps this summary of American Teen would be more exciting if it weren’t roughly identical to the taglines of 90 percent of MTV’s afternoon programming. Although this latest foray into teenagers’ hidden lives is earnest and funny, it often reads as a mash-up of pop culture’s greatest hits.
The high school in question is Warsaw Community High School in rural Indiana, which seems appropriately all-American for the film’s purposes. Nanette Burstein, the film’s director and producer, ran rigorous auditions to find the perfect subjects—and find them she did. The five main teenagers have been carefully selected to fill five well-known stereotypes: There’s Colin, the jock; Hannah, the rebel; Jake, the nerd; Megan, the princess; and Mitch, the heartthrob. To help out moviegoers who never saw The Breakfast Club, the film’s trailer superimposes these labels over the teens’ images.
It isn’t hard to see how these kids got Burstein’s stamp of approval. They are enthusiastic, fresh-faced and sympathetic—even snotty Megan, who takes revenge on her enemies in increasingly horrific ways, finds some redemption. It must have been tough for Burstein to find five teens that are interesting enough to watch for an hour and a half, but unspecial enough to be accessible—but she seems to have succeeded. These teens aren’t prodigies or jetsetters, future billionaires or Nobel Peace Prize winners¬¬. In a summer of Miley Cyruses and Nastia Liukins, the Warsaw kids are extraordinarily average.
The extent to which their normalcy has been engineered by editing is unclear, since this film is slickly cut and ruthlessly well-organized. But these teens put on a good show of fitting into the niches Burstein assigns them—and why shouldn’t they? Although no one acknowledges as much, this documentary constitutes half the ticket out of Warsaw. (The other half of the ticket is college, a storyline that the film does track.) These teens are champing at the bit to get out of their dead-end hometown, and Burstein promises them an introduction into the film industry, a glamorous summer of promoting the movie and a devoted Facebook fan base—all they have to do is let Burstein follow them around for a year. They demonstrate their appreciation of such a sweet deal by revealing just about anything to the camera.
You get the sense that such permissiveness is meant to shock. But a lot has changed since Burstein began shooting. Reality television has inured us to the most horribly intimate details of teens’ lives, whether the latest young wannabe is getting a bikini wax from her soon-to-be mother-in-law or confessing her six-year-long crush on her best friend. MTV’s grittier entry into the genre, True Life, boasts episode titles such as “I’ve Got Baby Mama Drama” and “I’m Addicted to Crystal Meth.” (Though these are interspersed with the somewhat less sensational “I’m Having a Summer Romance” and “I Own a Summer Share.”)
In comparison to these weighty topics, American Teen’s revelations about sordid teen life are somewhat anticlimactic, especially if you’ve ever been through high school. So although you can practically hear the filmmakers gasping with delight as the teens unveil a handle of vodka, in the theater the sounds are mostly yawns. Underage drinking reigns supreme, but no other drug use is shown. For the most part, the subjects are morally grounded, honor their mothers and fathers and avoid the principal’s office. Megan does seriously nasty stuff, courts suspension and induces offended yelps from the audience, but she’s the anomaly and by far the biggest troublemaker: In the film’s Breakfast Club–knockoff posters, Judd Nelson’s “criminal” character has been replaced by “heartthrob” Mitch.
Although this wholesomeness can become cloying, it’s also what gives the film a niche in the blur-tool-fueled reality circuit—and what makes it relatable. As it becomes clear that there will be no murderous rampages or study-hall orgies at WCHS, the film accepts that the interesting story is not the filmmaker’s quest to learn some insidious secret of high school, but instead each teen’s attempt to contrive his or her own path out of Warsaw.
At first, those journeys seem to come pre-packaged in 90-minute story arcs, as lazily generic as the movie’s title. If Colin doesn’t get a college basketball scholarship, he’ll have to enlist in the army. Hannah sets her sights on California, but a three-week string of absences threatens her diploma. Jake just really, really wants a girlfriend. But the film is marked with family nuances that keep these stories absorbing—such as Colin’s Elvis-impersonating father, who advises him on basketball while wearing a sparkly jumpsuit; Hannah’s fears of inheriting her mother’s manic depression; and Jake’s introduction to drunken shenanigans in San Diego, courtesy of his older brother.
For a film that clearly gorged itself on John Hughes’s oeuvre, how eerily perfect that all of the teens’ lives are shaped so concretely by their family situations! If these sequences, especially Megan’s, closely mirror Breakfast Club’s style of gradual revelations about each kid’s troubled home life, or Pretty in Pink’s rich-versus-poor look at socioeconomic division—well, fine. As should be pretty obvious from the number of times Breakfast Club has already come up in this review, American Teen is not a movie striving for subtlety as it builds connections to the 1985 hit.
The easy response is that Burstein is just trying to capitalize on the nostalgic niche that John Hughes occupies in the hearts and minds of our generation—a generation anxious for inclusion in the hip ’80s, despite that our best memories of that decade were sponsored by Gerber’s and Pampers.
But let’s be a little more optimistic. Maybe Burstein’s trying to prove that the transition from child to adult is as humiliating and impossible for teens today as it was for every other generation. True, as messages go, it isn’t that original. Your parents could have taught you the same lesson in the time it takes Jake’s taxidermy collection to scare off yet another potential girlfriend. But your parents wouldn’t have been as hilarious as Jake’s pick-up lines, or as exhilarating as Colin’s final basketball game for college scouts, or as alluring as Mitch wearing a dinosaur costume for Hannah. Oh, Mitch. What a heartthrob.