THE NEW DOCUMENTARY, American Teen, has been sold to audiences as a real life version of The Breakfast Club. In that John Hughes classic, five high school students gather for Saturday detention. Locked together in a library, the teenagers represent the archetypes seen in every high school hallway: the princess, the athlete, the brain, the criminal, the basket case. Over the course of their punishment the quintet evolve past the stereotypes and get to know each other as people. Moral progress achieved, credits roll.

Real life, of course, is far messier, far harder to change, and full of people you can’t bring yourself to like. That seems to be the lesson of American Teen, an entertaining if not especially enlightening look at the senior year of high school in a small Midwestern town. Hannah Bailey is the freak, Mitch Reinholdt and Colin Clemens compete to fill the role of jock, Megan Krizmanich is the spoiled princess, and Jake Tusing is the resident nerd.