There is a song from an old Broadway musical ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ that poses the question; ‘What is wrong with the kids today?’ That show may be some fifty years old now and when you think about it many of us were the kids in question. Ever since the human race began parents have been shaking their heads trying in vein to understand their children. While each generation has problems unique to that time and place many of the problems teens face are universal and timeless. For a long time this teen angst has been the subject of movies. From ‘The Breakfast Club’ to ‘Rebel without a Cause’ the emotional and physical changes that teens undergo have been fodder for the film maker. Most of the films that deal with the difficulty inherent in growing up a few have taken the documentary approach. One of the latest to do such is ‘American Teen’ by film maker Nanette Burstein. It’s charter is to look at the senior year of five socially different teens as the attempt to navigate their senior year in high school. Personally this was something different for me. I attended Brooklyn Technical High School here in New York City. It was, the name implies, a technical school heavy on the sciences. Brooklyn Tech was also an all male school back when I attended so many of the social interactions such as meeting a girl or dating was different than most people experienced. With no personal experience to fall back on I had to look at this film as an anthropologist would look at a foreign culture. It was a real eye opener from that perspective. If you are able to better personalize the content of this film it should hit home even harder. We all remember our teen years but for most it is through the hazy of the many years that have passed. Younger people would be able to readily identify with the subjects of this documentary. The film was made on a modest budget and went through the usual independent film festival circuit including the Sundance Film Festival where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won Ms Burstein the Directing Award. In the United States the DVD will be available exclusively for sale at Target and for rent at all major rental locations. Hopefully Paramount will make it available through a wide DVD distribution after this initial restricted offering. The film has some difficulties but overall it is a compelling look at a sub set of American teenagers.

As with any form of anthropological research it is vital to define your subject set up front. The title is a little misleading but understandably so. This film uses a subject sample of five 17 year olds from Warsaw, Indiana. This is a small community of about 18,000 residents, middle class, dominantly Christian and mostly Caucasian. It is a mostly republican town in the middle of a long standing red state. There is no ethnic diversity within the five teens that are presented here. While this does not represent all of America it is a reasonable sampling of Middle America. It would be very interesting if Bernstein repeated this in a more diverse community. According to what I have read about this production only 10% of the schools Bernstein contacted were willing to allow cameras to follow their students for an entire year. This may have been out of the rational fear that the children would be exploited in some fashion. To her credit Bernstein did not; for the most part she let the teens tell what is going on in their lives.

It is well established that high school, like much of the life that follows it, is ruled by clique. Your identity and social placement is dependent on which clique you are in. The five that are shown here are pretty much out of the casting directions for ‘The Breakfast Club’. Some may see that as a negative; going in a cliché direction. Actually the reverse is true. The reason why that fictional film resonated so well with audiences is it showed the most common cliques in high school. So, here we get the popular girl, the popular boy, the jock, the loner and the nerd. The film begins on the subject’s first day of senior year. We see Hannah Bailey as she gets up to face the coming year. She drives to school having a cigarette along the way. She is the loner; artistic, musical with a yearning to become a film maker. Hannah is on the lower end of the economic spectrum; not a wealthy family, working class. After some brief hellos the students recite the pledge of allegiance and get down to the day. At the top of the social structure is the queen bee, Megan Krizmanich. She is the most popular girl in the school, excellent in her academics, in many extracurricular activities and has her eye set on attending the University of Notre Dame. She enjoys shooting guns and is described by her friends as a drama queen. From the outside she can seem mean and demanding and manipulating others is par for the course. This is a basket ball school and the leader of the jock group is their best player, Colin Clemens. He is affable and typically easy going. He realizes that this is his most important year for him if he expects to get a sport scholarship. The nerd contingent is represented by Jake Tusing. He is in the marching band, loves video games and wants to have some chance at romance. Last there is a teammate of Colin’s, Mitch Reinholt. He is pretty much a clone to Colin and enters the story when he breaks ranks and dates Hannah. Much of the initial narration is by Hannah.

Most of the scenes appear honest enough. There is a little bit if a ‘Hills’ contrived vibe at times but for the most part I did believe that the film maker and kids were being open and frank. There is one scene that will upset a lot of parents. The popular kids are sitting around in a bedroom. They are pouring liberal alcoholic drinks and taking about their first time with oral sex. We all know this happens but when you see these fresh faced mid western teens talking about things like this it just seem to drive the point home. A lot of the material covered has been done before in a fictional venue but this is a reasonably good documentary. It is well paced and I am sure that the editing helped to tell the different stories. Still, this is what is going on in a nice Middle American town and as such relates to us all in one way or another. These are kids that are now the adults of the next generation. It is difficult growing up and in many ways these kids have it easier than most but there is still the emotional turmoil that all teens go through.