95 minutes

In theaters, August 1, 2008

Rating: PG-13, Documentary

A teenager, goes an old joke, is an adolescent constantly irked by disobedient parents.

That and several other bits of generational wisdom are put to the test in American Teen, in which five teens go under the movie microscope, each of them unique but also cookie-cutter familiar. That's the fascinating charm of this documentary: everything we see and hear seems simultaneously old and new.