BABY, IT'S HUGHES

Enough blather about Westerns and I film noir. The greatest of American genres, at least since Sal Mineo I wore zits, has been that cauldron of LM caste and identity otherwise known as the high-school movie. It's a genre that still has legs, even a quarter-century after John Hughes's golden era, when the writerdirector invested locker-lined hallways with the grandeur of John Ford's Monument Valley. Released this month, American Teen is the great Hughes movie that Hughes never made. This one has it all. See the imperious queen bee ruthlessly crushing rivals! See the star jock straining under the weight of Dad's expectations! See the outcast arty girl with big-city dreams, and the incrowd hunk secretly attracted to her! And down there, at the bottom of the social barrelgross!—see the horny, hapless band geek. What's scary, and makes for fresh spectacle, is that American Teen is a documentary, filmed during the 2005-6 school year at a small-town Indiana high school. The director is Nanette Burstein, who co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture. Whether thanks to trust or the natural instinct of teenagers to play to a camera, she and we are witness to unnervingly candid scenes of casual cruelty, despair, texted breakups, and under-age alcohol abuse. Rooting interest approaches Rocky levels—Go, arty girl, go!—thanks to clever editing and the kids' native appeal. But one is also left wondering whether, in the way that real-life mobsters are said to take stylistic cues from the Godfather movies, the American high school has become one big Pretty in Pink loop.

BRUCE HANDY