Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen shadows a handful of teenagers through their final year of high school in Warsaw, Indiana. The horribly compelling selling point is that it is edited like a cheap soap. This is more Grange Hill than a cool and rational appraisal of the wobbles and privileges of the American public education system. Burstein has extraordinary access to bedrooms, tantrums, parents, crisis meetings, the school principal, and tears. Her story is deliciously intimate, but the director herself is eerily absent. So too is the point.

Her chosen teenagers are classic school archetypes. Colin is a basketball jock who has to get a sports scholarship or kiss goodbye to college. Megan is the spoilt bitch who drives a Mercedes and adopts friends like pilot fish. Hannah is the artistic, highly strung emo. And Jake is a self-confessed geek whose bedroom looks like Norman Bates’s office.

Their emotional crises are packaged into neat, digestible stories. Often too neat for words. No one spends a single second on homework. Indeed no one opens a book in the entire year. The documentary curriculum is sex, gossip and self-pity. Not exactly original, but disturbingly true.

15, 95 mins

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