This Is Our Youth

“Do I have to change my name / Will it get me far / Should I lose some weight / Am I gonna be a star.”

So sang Madonna in her 2003 single “American Life,” and you’d guess, so think the teenagers seen in the new documentary American Teen.

Directed by Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture, the Oscar-nominated On the Ropes), who won the Directing Award at Sundance last winter, American Teen follows the archetypal lives of five Warsaw, Ind., class of 2006 seniors., as they seek the answers to the all-important questions “Who am I?” and “Who am I going to be?”

There’s the band geek, the artsy girl, the heartthrob, the bitchy popular girl, and the basketball jock, as well as their dreams, their insecurities, and their fallings in and out of love.

In American Teen, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The cliques also are there, as well as the games they play – and by that I mean the head games they play (I’m looking at you, popular girl).

We see these kids are keenly aware of their surroundings and one another, but they are quite vulnerable to these elements.

They’re full of energy, but they don’t know how to channel yet or comprehend it. And they want to be stars – the stars they want to be for themselves, the stars their families want them to be, the stars fate wants them to be.

The artsy girl, for instance, frets about not getting out of Warsaw, the popular girl worries about whether she will get into the University Notre Dame as is her family’s tradition, the basketball jock about getting a scholarship. Burstein take us on their journey, and in the end, their respective final destinations surprise us.

To borrow a phrase, you’ll seat there in the audience and think you know who these kids are, but you have no idea. These are their lives. There’s more to them than the roles they fulfill in high school, and it’s fascinating to see them realize it.

Burstein shot her subjects daily for 10 months, developing a clear understanding of their lives. Her documentary truly captures that – this ain’t The Hills.

American Teen is authentic and compelling and real. Let’s hear it for our youth

My Rating ****

Photo: Paramount Vantage.