Hormones, acne, first loves, first heartbreaks, cliques, peer pressure, parent pressure, teacher and coach pressure, the challenges of getting into a good college, and the specter of an unknown future … makes you wish you were a teenager again, doesn’t it?

For documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein, just one trip into teenage hell wasn’t enough. For a full year, she embarked on a project that transported her to the hallways and classrooms of a typical Middle-American high school. American Teen tells the stories of four teenagers and their friends as they navigate the treacherous waters of senior year at Warsaw Community High School in Warsaw, Indiana. Colin is the local sports star who needs a basketball scholarship if he’s to avoid the army; Megan is the homecoming queen who belittles everyone around her in an attempt to maintain her status as the most popular girl; Hannah is the artsy girl nobody understands nor, frankly, cares to; and Jake is the nerd who’s looking for love in all the wrong places. Sounds like a John Hughes movie.

“If you watch teen fiction films, they basically break down to four or five storylines over and over again,” Burstein explained. “You know, the ‘sports’ story, the ‘mean girls’ story, the ‘love across clique lines or class lines’ story, and the ‘loner kid looking for acceptance and love’ story.

“Those archetypes all come from reality,” she said. “I witnessed them in my own high school.... But I thought I could make them a lot richer than what I’d seen before. I knew [teenagers] were a lot more complicated in real life than they are depicted in fiction films.”

To find her subjects, the Sundance Film Festival alum (Burstein codirected 1999 Special Jury Prize winner On The Ropes with Brett Morgen) looked in several different states but limited her search to schools in America’s heartland. “There’s something very symbolic about Middle America,” she said. “And I wanted it to be in a town that only had one high school, so they couldn’t escape from their social reality. And I wanted it to be as economically and racially mixed as one can find in the Midwest, which isn’t easy to find at all.

“We narrowed it down to about 10 schools and I went into each of them and interviewed all the incoming seniors who were interested. About 40-50 percent of the class showed up. And given that, I went for the school that had the best stories and the people I was looking for. So that’s how we ended up [in Warsaw].”

And what stereotype did Burstein fit into in high school? “It’s funny,” she said, “I started out in early high school as the popular girl and then became increasingly more like Hannah [the artsy girl]. I went to Spain my junior year in high school as this preppy girl and came home with a pink Mohawk.”