All Amer­i­can High Revisited

We all love a bit of Where-Are-They-Now?-ing. It’s the sort of idle puff that has filled the back pages of music mags for years. Who can fail to be moved by the deep and del­i­cate inter­twin­ing of the mul­ti­tudi­nous threads of our human tapes­try that finds some frothy-haired bass play­er from a fey ​’90s shoe-gaz­er band even­tu­al­ly design­ing bespoke inflat­able ken­nels for minor Sau­di roy­als, or the drum­mer from the Sneak­er Pimps lead­ing award-win­ning cor­po­rate hang-glid­er retreats off the Orkneys?

It’s some­thing Keva Rosenfeld’s redux/​extended/​anniversary cut of his 60 minute 1986 High School doc­u­men­tary All Amer­i­can High exploits to break­ing point when invit­ing us to check in with its cast of Modesto, Ca stu­dents a full 30 years after their school lives were com­mit­ted to film. But before we get to find out where they are now, we need to know who they were then.

The main body of the film com­pris­es Rosenfeld’s fly-on the-wall study of a bunch of well-fed Cal­i­forn­ian teens par­tic­i­pat­ing in a glo­ri­ous­ly grim series of pas­tich­es on best-for­got­ten ​’80s Repub­li­can-Right banalaties that includes surf­ing lessons, mock wed­dings, a video arcade sit­u­at­ed with­in the school, lessons on how to dec­o­rate an apart­ment and – with a cheer­less nod to the in-built obso­les­cence of the one-size-fits-all pit­falls of Reagan’s Amer­i­can Dream­ing – a ​‘Sur­vival of Sin­gles’ class that teach­es 15-year-old kids how to win a new part­ner after they get divorced. There’s even an a class in which an avun­cu­lar recruit­ment offi­cer from the US Army shills five grand sign­ing-on bonus­es and con­stant water-skiing.

It starts bright­ly, with some bum­fluff-tached Iron Maid­en fan pon­tif­i­cat­ing the ​‘Punkers, Prep­pies and Met­allers’ that make up the school’s ranks. Then we cut to some game female Finnish exchange stu­dent who gives us the out­sider skin­ny. She’s chip­per enough com­pa­ny, but when it starts to dawn that hers will be the only view of school life we will hear about for the rest of the film atten­tion starts to drift. The Met­allers and Punkers are shunt­ed aside for Jocks and Cheer­lead­ers, with only the odd fleet­ing shots of skin­heads wear­ing Sid Vicious t‑shirts and Judas Priest devo­tees lean­ing against chain-link fences to fill in the blank generation.

But if Rosen­feld miss­es a few nar­ra­tive tricks, he makes up for them with grainy, half-remem­bered scenes of home­com­ing parades, keg­gers, dances and Fri­day night-foot­ball that belong between the lines of a song co-writ­ten by Bruce Spring­steen and Stephen King. These vague, lim­i­nal inter­ludes are wel­come but can’t quite paper over the cracks at the core of a film that was hob­bled by its ini­tial choices.

The clos­ing 20 min­utes catch­es us up with the growed-up kids from the class of ​’86, but because the orig­i­nal film took so lit­tle inter­est in anyone’s per­spec­tive oth­er than its cen­tral sub­ject a lot of this – while being gen­er­al­ly inter­est­ing on a rub­ber­neck­ing lev­el – feels forced, arbi­trary, under­de­vel­oped and tacked on pure­ly to make the orig­i­nal film up to fea­ture length.