Each falls at one point. But all of them - The Mean Girl, the Band Geek, the Heartthrob, the Jock and the Outsider - climb back on the wire to complete the journey fraught with much self-consciousness, paralyzing low self-esteem, and high, high hopes.
In a bonehead move, Paramount Vantage is selling the film as if it were The Breakfast Club, with a poster of the five central characters posed like the five stars of the beloved 1985 John Hughes feature. (Breakfast Club is all the rage - even J.C. Penney has co-opted it for its back-to-school ad campaign.)
Chicken-or-egg question: Did the studio likewise impose archetypal labels on Burstein's subjects or do secondary-school students naturally sort out along certain basic types? In any event, these real-life teens recall reel heroes and heroines.
The Outsider is Hannah Bailey, the Molly Ringwald type, a ladder-legged brunette who walks with a bounce in her and barbed-wire around her heart. (Her mother is a manic/depressive and Hannah worries that this is her fate.) Hannah explains the basic contradiction of high school. Teachers tell students that America is a meritocracy, but WCHS is a caste system where the jocks and rich kids are the masters and everyone else is a peon. Each of the teens under Burstein's spotlight learns to juggle the contradictions.
Yet The Jock, Colin Clemens, the lantern-jawed center of the basketball team (in a state where hoops is practically a religion), is not a masters-of-the-universe type. Quiet and focused - D.B. Sweeney with an Emilio Estevez smile - Colin tries to reconcile his father's advice (hotdog hotdog hotdog to catch the eye of recruiters to get that athletic scholarship) with his coach's (share the ball share the ball share the ball).
