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Critics Consensus: Using a smartly assembled blend of archival footage and well-made re-enactments, Teenage surveys the rise of adolescent culture with tenderness and wit.
Critic Consensus: Using a smartly assembled blend of archival footage and well-made re-enactments, Teenage surveys the rise of adolescent culture with tenderness and wit.
All Critics (63) | Top Critics (19) | Fresh (48) | Rotten (15)
A roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.
Deftly weaves together various media in a way that breathes its own youthful, stream-of-conscious life into the documentary genre.
There's no "there" there in "Teenage," a meandering mess of a documentary that has the feel of a bloated, inchoate term paper.
Wolf's sympathy for youth movements compensates for the distraction of the new scenes, and the fascinating old footage seals the deal.
If Teenage delivers a sweeping generalization or two (or three) ... Wolf's documentary makes up for it with footage that's just too good to be ignored.
Director Matt Wolf uses startling archival footage to capture the rise of pre-Elvis youth culture as the defining surge of the 20th century.
The collage effect recalls Ken Burns' documentaries for PBS, particularly since Wolf also occasionally inserts still photographs towards which he zooms in slowly in order to approximate movement.
The documentary's enjoyable to watch, and refreshingly not tongue-in-cheek. There's a toughness at its core that gives it great value.
This movie does have interesting snippets of history about people on society's fringes, especially people who were way ahead of their time in terms of youth culture, but if you want a better overview of this issue, you will have to read the book.
Arty yet superficial treatment of provocative subject matter...
Insightful docu traces historical evolution of adolescence.
Filmmaker Matt Wolf's Teenage tracks the origins of modern youth culture through the early 20th Century, to intriguing but inconclusive results
A companion piece to the book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, 1875-1945. As the title states we're exploring the development of youth culture from 1875 to 1945. So, this film does not venture into teen culture of the 1950s, 1960s, or beyond. This was the most disappointing part, that the doc did not draw any connections between this time period and the decades to come. The young actors styled to look like teens of various times and places with journal entries narrated to tell their specific stories worked well. However, it is all the archival materials that bring the formation of the term teenagers to life.
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