Critics reviews

Wolf's reliance on archival material is a refreshing alternative to the too-common use of talking heads in documentary filmmaking... However, the task of producing some kind of definite history of the 20th century from the point of view of teenagers is a thankless and unwinnable one. As a history of and by these figures of latent revolution, creativity, and youth, the film is marred by a rather linear sense of time, an awfully tame voiceover, and a very well-behaved sense of audio-visual poesis.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Teenage can be suspect. That's an actress playing British socialite Brenda Dean Paul, for instance, in anachronistic 8mm color footage. While Wolf's seamless blend of real and fake images emphasizes the notion that history is a construct, it also renders the movie conceptually incoherent—the cinematic equivalent of a term paper whose author hasn't assembled the necessary source material to craft a complete argument.

Sometimes, the results are British bad girls twirling like Ke$ha in a pop video; Wolf's creative license isn't always valid. Yet a keening original score by Deerhunter's Bradford Cox serves the same purpose that Cocteau Twins lullabies do in a Gregg Araki movie, lending this adolescence a sad ache.

A delightful and substantial provocation, and something of a cheat... The cannily chosen (or, as it turns out, staged) scenes have a time-capsule aura that invites home-video contemplation through slow motion and freeze-frames. Such analytical devices might unmask the trickery; meanwhile, if ever a feature film needed truth in labelling, not in the fine print but in real time onscreen, this is it.

With his latest effort, Wolf ditches any pretence of formalism. There are no talking heads and no easy signposts. Instead, he frames his chronicle — essentially the ‘coming out' of modern youth — as a kind of monochromatic historical collage of old news reels and dramatic recreations. Teenage is clearly a beautiful, soulful piece of work, there's no denying that. But it's also rather underdeveloped, like an old photograph that's been whipped out of the metol before it can set.

The movie is loaded with treasures, all of them lovingly examined and edited. The problem is that Savage's book needs a series to fulfill the expectations it raises, and Wolf's cinematic refinement is at odds with the hormonally driven chaos of adolescence.