I'm only a few years out of high school so a lot of the memories from those four years are pretty fresh in my mind. It was a mix of a lot of different moments ranging from amazing to horrible, but overall a fun four years if it hadn't been for the homework. When I see documentaries about high school and the kids that attend them, I often find that most of them don't really represent the experience my peers and I had. That bein said, I didn't grow up in a rural town or a big city. Suburban New Jersey life may be extremely different from the way the rest of the world is run, I don't know, but I know now that it's still different from Indiana.
American Teen follows the lives of a group of teenagers during their senior year of high schools. There's the usual triumphs and tragedies that accompany the final year of high school, but there aren't a whole lot of surprises. If the director saught out to find the stereotypical examples of the kids you'd find in a high school, then she certainly succeeded in that effort. There is the jock, the geek, the queen, the artist, and the freaks. We are introduced to these students over the course of the film and get to learn about their lives as we go along. It helps us understand the characters better, but it doesn't do anything more than the Breakfast Club did.
There were a lot of moments I found myself wondering whether or not it was at all possible for some of these events to be occurring. For example, the kinds of antics Megan, the princess of the school, gets away with and orchestrates border on manipulative megalomania. And on the other end, there are some painfully awkward moments coming out of resident geek Jake. Who at 17 shows up at your date's house with a bouquet of roses? Props to him for having the guts to do it, though.
I don't know, maybe my high school experience was so different from this that I can't connect with it very well, but overall I think a competent job was done in executing the story. The cartoon sequences that illustrate some of the students' hopes, dreams, and fears were very well done and I wish they had presented themselves more often throughout the film. Overall, I think American Teen does a good job of painting a picture of high school life in Warsaw, Indiana, but perhaps not everywhere else. I'm starting to think more and more that you'd need to have a documentary for every high school to properly represent most people's high school career.