Seventeen hasn’t looked this good since THE BREAKFAST CLUB. Small-town Indiana is the backdrop to this unabashedly entertaining documentary by Nanette Burstein (ON THE ROPES, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) in which, over the course of a senior year, we’re introduced to the prototypical brain, beauty, jock, rebel and recluse of Generation Y. While passing notes has upgraded to text messaging, and MySpace and Facebook have replaced the mall as the place to see and be seen, rest assured that the same pressures, cliques, insecurities, jealousies, first loves, and heartbreaks that have plagued teenagers since the beginning of time are alive and well.

Basketball star and all-around nice guy Colin gets much-needed street cred through his Elvis-impersonating father. Marching band aficionado Jake longs for a girlfriend willing to see past his acne and latent growth spurt. Debutante and overachiever Megan enjoys numerous extracurricular activities—making others feel inferior is her favorite. And Hannah is an iconoclastic artist, too genuine and interesting to be appreciated by her peers.

Although these “real life” characters may appear straight out of central casting, they reveal themselves as far more complex and substantive than the typical “real world” fare. Burstein, who spent a year living in the same Indiana town as the students, quickly cuts through their occasional self-conscious MTV-isms to get to the heart of their stories. AMERICAN TEEN is neither upgraded reality television nor straightforward ethnography—it is an unexpectedly moving documentary with heart, soul and of course, graduation.

-Sky Sitney