Film critic Adrian Martin once argued that films about teenagers are, above all, about “what cultural theorists call the liminal experience: that intense, suspended moment between yesterday and tomorrow, between childhood and adulthood, between being a nobody and a somebody, when everything is in question, and anything is possible.”
With so much in question for America’s youth in the past few years, liminality takes on a new charge in a quartet of documentaries about American teenagers that premiered this past week at the Sundance Film Festival. In each of these films, youth find themselves suspended between opposites that form the core of American identity in the 21st century.
The films themselves represent strikingly different takes on similar issues. Peter Nicks’s “Homeroom,” the conclusion of his trilogy of nonfiction portraits of Oakland, California through its struggling institutions, offers a fly-on-the-wall view of Oakland High School’s 2020 senior class. From the opening image of bleary-eyed senior Denilson recording his first day of school for social media, we gain a sense of these young people as caught between the potential of their senior year and the reality that met them in 2020.
While the effects of COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd haunt every frame of this vérité doc that begins with bustling high school hallways filled with crowds of unmasked faces, the major arc of “Homeroom” is the efforts of Denilson and his fellow student leaders to defund the school’s police force. They are initially defeated at a school board meeting that devolves into something between a demonstration and a shouting match between parents. Watching this scene unfold, our sympathies shift firmly toward the youth who first ask for order and then quietly leave the adults to the chaos they have created, regrouping in the parking lot. As the year unfolds, Denilson and his cohort take to the streets, attend class and school board meetings on Zoom, and demonstrate an adaptable yet uncompromising commitment to their ideals.
The liminality of contemporary American identity is also at the heart of Maisie Crow’s “At the Ready,” which follows three Mexican-American students who aspire toward careers in policing. On the surface, “At the Ready”’s exploration of law enforcement in high school could not seem more different from “Homeroom.” Where the youth in “Homeroom” seek to remove police from schools, “At the Ready” explores how embedded law enforcement is in El Paso, Texas’s Horizon High School, which boasts a dedicated educational program and a highly competitive Criminal Justice Club advised by former police officers. Yet Horizon’s Criminal Justice Club members are equally committed to police reform, only from the inside out.
As careers with Border Patrol, ICE, and the DEA offer access to some of the best paying jobs available to high school graduates, these students drill constantly in the halls of their high school, yielding images of young people wielding fake firearms in classrooms that only a short while before hosted lectures and discussions. One of the film’s thought-provoking, offhand shots shows the group, clad in tactical gear, preparing to breach a classroom door when it suddenly opens and a teacher quietly emerges, book in hand, a striking contrast to the show of force on the other side of the frame. Through moments like these, Crow weaves a narrative of how these students attempt to navigate their individual identities and relationships to policing while endeavoring to achieve their American Dream of stable, secure employment that allows them to be who they are.
The strive for the American Dream also permeates the halls of Lowell High School, San Francisco’s top public high school, where almost every student aspires to go to Stanford, or, barring that, Harvard or Yale. Like “At the Ready,” the students at Lowell are focused on life after high school in a world where the freedom to do what you want must first be earned by conforming to a certain image of success. As one student explains to the camera, his mother has told him that when you are young, you exist inside a box that progressively expands as you get older until it disappears and you are free to do what you like. Right now, though, as a high school student, he is in a pretty tight box.
“Try Harder!” follows these hardworking students as they learn to let go of expectations placed on them by others at the same time it underscores continued inequalities in American education. As we learn, coming from a majority Asian American high school full of over-achievers, Lowell students are often at a disadvantage when applying to the top colleges, a fact that admissions officers often note in info sessions. For these students, hard work cannot overcome external perceptions of them as a monolithic group of “machines” who pile up advanced placement credits and resume bullet points. However, “Try Harder!” demonstrates that Lowell is no factory, with depictions of dedicated teachers who offer an image of education as something beyond a credential.
No inspiring teachers appear in Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt’s “Cusp,” an atmospheric documentary with notes of Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey.” Instead we are immersed in the haze of a lazy rural Texas summer where three young women navigate a world largely on their own, where a teenager smokes cigarettes while wearing a ratty bathrobe and a mother in her 40s is almost indistinguishable from her fifteen-year-old daughter in the right lighting. Teenagers Autumn, Brittney, and Aaloni come across as both very young and old beyond their years, a rampant condition as they spend most of their time with each other and the teenage boys who offer them drugs, alcohol, and rides to parties and target practice. What stays with you is the feeling of being caught between parents who neglect or abuse these girls and the boys who do the same. Each of the girls can describe an unwanted sexual experience but are resigned to this as a reality of growing up female and working class. Through the film’s vérité style, you not only feel for these girls but come along with them for the ride, becoming part of this liminal experience yourself.
As always, this year’s Sundance offered (besides the first chance to see these films) opportunities to connect with the directors and even the subjects themselves about the next steps for each of these groups of teens. I won’t spoil the endings of these films or what has transpired afterward, but suffice to say that these kids look to be alright.
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This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2021.