REVIEW: Mesmerizing ?Teenage? Rebels Against Traditional Documentary Form

It?s hard to reconcile, considering the degree to which adolescents now dominate popular culture, but the idea of the teenager is a uniquely 20th-century invention, born out of advances in psychological theory, changes in child-labor laws and a boom in leisure-time activities for the under-20 set. A feat of both editing and blurring-of-the-edges nonfiction technique, Matt Wolf?s mesmerizing, scrapbook-style Teenage�conveys the transition in how the world perceived this emerging in-between stage via a series of first-person portraits of exceptional individuals set amid a whirlwind of vintage footage. Ironically, the demo in question seems least likely to appreciate the pic?s arty, innovative approach.

The conventional thinking goes that until roughly World War II, society and scientists alike thought of life as two distinct stages, divided between children and adults. The former were patronized and sheltered up to a certain point, then shuffled off to work in factories at a young age. In the introduction to his paradigm-shifting book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage, who collaborated with Wolf on this film, reveals that his initial research into the subject began as background for a possible television series, suggesting that he always intended a multimedia approach to the topic.

Eschewing the traditional TV documentary style, Wolf innovates a radically different format for the material, blending archival artifacts with invented elements to create an intimate, far more personal history of the emerging demographic across the four decades between 1904 and 1945, when Elliot E. Cohen published his young person?s manifesto, ?A Teen-Age Bill of Rights,? in the New York Times. Though much of the footage has a stock newsreel feel, Teenage�is clearly intended to suggest a home movie record of its era. To that end, Wolf interweaves staged, retro-styled scenes of various characters to foster the illusion of…

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