Teenage (2014)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
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.
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Movie Info
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Cast
as American Girl
as British Boy
as German Girl
as American Boy
as Melita Maschmann
as Brenda Dean Paul
as Tommie Scheel
as Melita Maschmann
as Warren Wall
News & Interviews for Teenage
Critic Reviews for Teenage
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.
Audience Reviews for Teenage
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.
Super Reviewer
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