After an exhaustive search for the right location to capture the essence of the American Teen experience, Burstein settled on the small town of Warsaw, Indiana and its sole high school, wherein she discovered five engaging seniors who were completely open to the documentary process. Also, much like the characters in The Breakfast Club, they initially embody each teenage “archetype,” only for us to realize that there’s much more going on behind the easy smiles and nervous laughs than we’d expected from the start.
Ruling the roost of the high school, we meet two popular, attractive basketball stars, Colin Clemens and Mitch Reinholdt, as well as the Student Council Vice President and extra-curricular Queen Bee, Megan Krizmanich. The son of an Elvis impersonator, Colin Clemens was groomed for athletic glory since he was given a Fisher Price basketball hoop as a baby. However, in the pressure to impress talent scouts and earn a scholarship, he begins struggling under the demands of his coach as well as his father who tells Colin in no uncertain terms that if he doesn’t earn a scholarship, he must enlist in the army. Whereas Colin is preoccupied with athletic and familial expectations and anxiety, his teammate Mitch finds his popularity jeopardized when he begins dating outside his social clique after finding himself drawn to the sensitive, brainy, fiercely passionate aspiring filmmaker Hannah Bailey.
Always eager to draw the lines of popular mores and the dos and don’ts of being one of the school’s untouchables, the beautiful, brainy, but unexpectedly vindictive blonde Megan Krizmanich doesn’t think twice about jeopardizing her admission into Notre Dame — there’s a family connection after all — in order to vandalize, trash, or embarrass anyone who crosses her. Obviously, Megan is easily depicted as the villainess of the piece despite her own typed update which plays during the film’s end credits notes arguing that she’s “matured… a lot” since becoming a college student.
And in filming some of Megan’s rather odious high school actions, it does make one wonder about the ethical implications of Burstein’s documentary since as a film, it will live on forever digitally and for better or worse, follow these students the same way that Michael Apted’s Up Series documentaries have followed his subjects their entire lives. While of course the students agreed to be filmed, I’m not sure this is the way that some of the kids would like to be cinematically immortalized, yet admirably Burstein never judges her subjects especially when things get increasingly dramatic.
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