AMERICAN TEEN – The Documentary Is All Growns Up

While not a narrative feature, AMERICAN TEEN can provide a lot of insight into what to do right to feature writers.

SPOILER TANTRUM

The film follows a group of high school seniors as they navigate their way through their last year of high school and the beginnings of adulthood. Each kid has one issue – Hannah trying to find her place as an alternakid with big aspirations in a close-minded, small town, Colin hoping to land a basketball scholarship so he can go to school, Megan wrestling with getting into Notre Dame like the rest of her family, or Jake trying to get a girlfriend. By focusing on one storyline per kid, the film has a chance to develop a character arc – for example, Hannah getting dumped, dating a popular kid, and deciding to move away to San Francisco over her parent’s objections – for each of the major characters. It also chooses a wide variety of different social strata to pick the characters from, from the most popular kids in school to an attractive weirdo to a friendless loner.

There are some moments of real humor as well, made even more funny by the fact that they’re unscripted. These come out in interesting places, like when Jake gets dumped, and help leaven the pathos a bit.

Ultimately, the film feels so universal because if you weren’t one of these kids in high school, you knew them. And in retrospect, you’ve gone through all of the things these kids are going through, things that felt so important at the time but you later realized weren’t so pressing.
Watching the film, I realized that I still do and feel a lot of the same ways that these kids do. I may have grown up, gotten a job and my own place, but emotionally, my life hasn’t changed that much since high school. Only I get laid a lot more.