An authentic look at high schoolers in heartland

If you drew a line west from Kankakee, Ill., and another one south from Kalamazoo, Mich., they would converge in the Indiana heartland near the town of Warsaw (pop. 13,000), pretty much in the middle of middle America.

There, at Warsaw Community High School (pop. 1,900) - where NBA star Rick Fox first made his name - documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein spent the 2005-06 year chronicling members of the senior class.

Five of them emerge as central figures in American Teen, an appealing and unexpectedly moving snapshot of 17-year-olds on the tightrope between family and future.

Each falls at one point. But all of them - The Mean Girl, the Band Geek, the Heartthrob, the Jock and the Outsider - climb back on the wire to complete the journey fraught with much self-consciousness, paralyzing low self-esteem, and high, high hopes.

In a bonehead move, Paramount Vantage is selling the film as if it were The Breakfast Club, with a poster of the five central characters posed like the five stars of the beloved 1985 John Hughes feature. (Breakfast Club is all the rage - even J.C. Penney has co-opted it for its back-to-school ad campaign.)

Chicken-or-egg question: Did the studio likewise impose archetypal labels on Burstein's subjects or do secondary-school students naturally sort out along certain basic types? In any event, these real-life teens recall reel heroes and heroines.

The Outsider is Hannah Bailey, the Molly Ringwald type, a ladder-legged brunette who walks with a bounce in her and barbed-wire around her heart. (Her mother is a manic/depressive and Hannah worries that this is her fate.) Hannah explains the basic contradiction of high school. Teachers tell students that America is a meritocracy, but WCHS is a caste system where the jocks and rich kids are the masters and everyone else is a peon. Each of the teens under Burstein's spotlight learns to juggle the contradictions.

Yet The Jock, Colin Clemens, the lantern-jawed center of the basketball team (in a state where hoops is practically a religion), is not a masters-of-the-universe type. Quiet and focused - D.B. Sweeney with an Emilio Estevez smile - Colin tries to reconcile his father's advice (hotdog hotdog hotdog to catch the eye of recruiters to get that athletic scholarship) with his coach's (share the ball share the ball share the ball).

Like Reese Witherspoon in Election, Megan Krizmanich is The Mean Girl with her eye on the prize - admission to Notre Dame. She does some despicable (and actionable) things. Did the presence of movie cameras encourage her to act out even more or to restrain herself?

Then there are the self-described Band Geek Jake Tusing, whose self-loathing and naked desire for a girlfriend are palpable, and his social opposite, Heartthrob Mitch Reinholt. Jake suggests Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin in Superbad), but cuter. Mitch suggests Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink, but cuter.

The students trusted Burstein enough to let her film them at their worst - and their most vulnerable, even the boys. The film does not pretend to be a fly-on-the-wall look at lived life. The subjects are miked and lit with care. The Heisenberg Principle, that the act of observing a process may alter that process (a physicist's way of saying that a watched pot never boils) is clearly in play.

But when we see one teen, miles away from another, text a chum and the camera shows the message sent and received, we wonder how could Burstein be in two places at once? Did she ask her subjects for reenactions?

While this question is unanswered - my hunch is that, yeah, there were retakes and reenacts - American Teen doesn't have that MTV's Real World feeling of events staged for the camera.

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions, that by graduation day I wept as if it were my spawn up there getting her diploma.