like Anvil, the recent movie about failing Canadian rockers, this study of a group of American teenagers in their final year of high school is on the mocu-documentary borderline. Is it for real - or not? Well, it is supposed to be real. Film-maker Nanette Burstein has followed five teenagers over 10 months as they prepare for adulthood. One's a jock, one's a nerd, one's a bitch-princess, and so on. Some things in it do look very authentic indeed, like one boy's acne. Yet there's an awful lot here which is simply too good, too dramatically shaped, to be true. Throughout the film I had a nagging sense that it simply had to be a hoax. One girl is a indie-chick outsider and wannabe film student - in a fiction feature, she would obviously be the director's autobiographical persona - and her boyfriend breaks up with her by text. We see the text in closeup. Ouch. Was that for real? The princess vandalises a rival's home: this scene really does look staged, or at least reconstructed. Or maybe it's simply that the teens involved were getting a sixth sense of what was going to look good on camera. Perhaps documentary film-making has become so self-conscious that the grammar of spoof has become overwhelmingly influential. Either way, this film was for me marred by the persistent suspicion that the director wasn't being entirely straight with us.