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"How have you forgiven yourself if it happened yesterday?"

Screened at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival

American Teen, a hit at Sundance and the rare documentary to win the national distribution lottery, is enormously entertaining storytelling but highly problematic documentary filmmaking. Nanette Burstein, who co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture, finds a group of fascinating ordinary high schoolers and constructs a rollicking storyline around their senior year exploits. She is a skilled enough filmmaker that the material earns real laughs and attains real poignancy, but her insistence on fitting these kids' lives into the molds of glossy Hollywood conventions leads large parts of her movie to appear stagey and suspicious. There was nary a scene when I didn't smile, or feel a pang of recognition or embarrassment, and the film's portrayal are ultimately convincing. But at the same time I constantly questioned Burstein's methods and even her ethics.

The film's playground is a high school in Warsaw, Indiana -- "mostly white, mostly Christian, and red-state all the way." There, Burstein finds subjects who virtually all fit some recognizable "type" familiar to us from pop culture. We have Megan, the bitchy, stuck-up homecoming queen; Colin, the basketball star; Hannah, the artsy "alternative" girl; Jake, the video game nerd with no self-esteem. And while there are a few "talking head" interviews with the kids scattered throughout the film, the vast majority of the running time purports to depict their daily lives -- their interactions with friends and family, their phone calls, even their e-mails. Burstein was apparently given unfettered access, as we are privy to these teenagers' most personal moments.

This is problematic on two fronts. First, it often feels like neither we nor the camerawoman should be there -- watching Hannah cry into her friend's arms after her boyfriend dumps her, for example, feels wrong and even a little dirty. Second, the film's slickness continuously calls Burstein's methods into question. How, exactly, did she manage to capture both ends of supposedly spontaneous phone conversations? Film both the sending and the receipt of a single e-mail? Sometimes the questions run even deeper. At one point, we apparently see Jake's girlfriend cheating on him with someone else (we later see her break up with him) and we wonder: did Burstein simply record this and say nothing to Jake? Or was the timing different from what Burstein's editing implies?

These are serious problems so long as you think of American Teen as a documentary, and have certain expectations for the medium. Once you accept the manipulations -- and remind yourself that Burstein's subjects are, by and large, out promoting the film -- these kids' stories begin to work. Their problems may be mundane -- getting into college; moving past a break-up; surviving the prom -- but the way the characters handle themselves speaks volumes. Some react to adversity with cruelty and transparent defense mechanisms while others respond with courage and resilience. Some work to better themselves and others succumb to peer pressure. The movie isn't overtly judgmental, and Burstein makes it clear that these are just kids and that none of them are irredeemable. At the same time, it's not afraid to observe its subjects when they're not at their best, and that makes their story arcs much more interesting.

So as the characters go off to college, we have more confidence in some of them than in others. Megan, we sense, needs to get more of a feel for how others perceive her (i.e. as a bitch). Jake needs more confidence, though he doesn't lack spirit; his relentless pursuit of romantic fortune despite having zero self-regard is, depending on your point of view, either endearing or sad, or possibly frustrating. Hannah does exactly what she needed to; a scene where she tells her self-absorbed parents that she doesn't want their lives (and thus won't take their advice) is a movie cliché brought to heartbreaking life. And Colin is the most well-adjusted of anyone we see, his ability to rebound from failure being nothing short of inspiring.

Was I led to some of these conclusions, perhaps unfairly, by the director and editor's sleight-of-hand? Maybe so. But all documentaries use editing and selective presentation to manipulate the stories they tell. I have my suspicions about Burstein's work here. But it is nonetheless a poignant film and an insightful one, focusing on a subject rarely covered in the movies: the ordinary American teenager.

--Eugene Novikov