American Teen (2008)
57th & Irving Productions, A&E

Description

Popularity is everything, breakups and missed jump-shots are the end of the world; a college acceptance is a dream come true; and an email forward to the wrong person is your worst nightmare.

Now experience senior year of high school through the eyes of five real-life Indiana teenagers: the Prom Queen, the Heartthrob, the Jock, the Rebel and the Geek. This revealing year-in-the-life feature deliveres the real heartbreak, hilarity, and - OMG - drama of senior year first-hand from five very different viewpoints.

Tags

2000s, Sundance award winner, USA, Education, Indiana

Editorial review

7.0 Documentary-Review.com | D. Brecker

Whether one should consider American Teen a documentary at all is debatable. It's certainly far from cinema verité. There's no doubt that the presence of the camera in this movie influences the subjects. The high school students portraited, the stereotypes and the "plot lines" could have been lifted from any MTV reality soap, and the students seem to know it. On the one hand, these youngsters are very media-savvy, but at the same time seem incredibly naive about the way their behaviour will look to an audience. While there's nothing new here for anyone beyond their teens, it is an entertaining portrayal of high school life somewhere in the USA in the 2000s.

Collected reviews and ratings

9.5 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

... weaned on years of The Real World, they're used to conducting their lives (such high drama, if only about cafeteria encounters!) with barely a fishnet filter between the private and the public, the posed and the authentic, the heartfelt and the reflexively, defensively ironic.
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9.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Mick LaSalle

"American Teen" shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature.
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9.0 DVD Verdict | Erich Asperschlager

Some documentarians take a hands-off approach to their subjects. Not Burstein. She takes every creative liberty to tell this story in the most interesting way. That means clever editing, audio-visual effects, and even animation. Each of the main characters gets his or her own short animated sequence, illustrating the primary hope, dream, or fear that defines their story. Purists can argue whether Burstein's heavy hand is appropriate in a documentary. The rest of us can enjoy the results.
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8.8 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

The documentary hit of Sundance 2008, American Teen offers up irresistible archetypes of everybody's high school years: the jock, the nerd, the prom queen. You can't blame filmmaker Nanette Burstein for focusing on these easily-relatable figures--they pop off the screen.
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7.5 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

"American Teen" isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein (who won best director at Sundance 2008) has achieved an engrossing film.
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7.5 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

These American teens really get under your skin. You'll be pissed. You'll be perplexed. You'll be totally riveted.
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7.0 New York Times | A. O. Scott

This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited. It tweaks but does not entirely satisfy your desire to see the alleged typicality of the Warsaw High seniors deepened into a source of social insight.
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6.3 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

American Teen offers no real insight into the minds and motivations of these individuals beyond the obvious (peer pressure, parental influence - both good and bad, a mixture of fear and anticipation of the future).
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5.0 Los Angeles Times | Michael Ordona

The self-consciousness of some scenes can feel inauthentic, such as the film's storybook sports moments. And though the teens have insisted nothing was staged, they admit alerting Burstein "when big things were going to happen," making the exercise vulnerable to the observer effect.
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5.0 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

As the many talking heads who have tried to explain themselves in reality TV “confessionals” or on FaceBook know well, the editing of any interaction, activity or comment, not to mention supplementary soundtrack, animation (which is overused in American Teen), or reaction shots, all shape narrative and move viewers. And in this calculus, subjects’ or even makers’ intentions can be sensationally irrelevant.
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3.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Cabin

In editing, framing, and even (dare I say?) dramatic arc, Teen is the distant cousin of the music channel's monster hit series The Hills, the heavily-manipulated "reality" show about a group of young women trying to make it in the fashion business.
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2.5 Austin Chronicle | Marjorie Baumgarten

Burstein ultimately tells us nothing about senior year in the heartland of America that we didn’t already know. However, the film’s revelations about our media-soaked society are revelatory. At times it’s almost like Lord of the Flies, with the camera serving as the flypaper dipped in the honey of the promised land of celebrity.
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2.0 filmcritic.com | Brian Orndorf

"American Teen" is hardly the cinema verite experience it wants to be, and while I’m not suggesting these droning, uncharismatic teenagers deserve sympathy, the real pocket of disdain should be reserved for Burstein and her negligent, contrived direction of this con game.
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2.0 Eye For Film

The kids themselves have become willing accomplices to their own marketing, appearing onstage at screenings to announce they’re open to acting careers. All in all, American Teen is as queasily entertaining as an episode of A&E’s Intervention: you’ll want to watch, but you may not respect yourself in the morning.
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