AMERICAN TEEN intimately follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. Using cinema vérité footage, interviews, and animation, it presents a candid portrait of being 17 and all that goes with it. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, the experimentation with sex and alcohol, the parental pressures, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.

In the film the stories coalesce into a narrative so engrossing that it resembles fiction more than documentary. The end result is a film that goes beyond the stereotypes of high school--the nerd and the jock, the homecoming queen and the arty misfit--to capture the complexity of young people trying to make their way into adulthood.