What’s daring about The Myth of the American Sleepover , a modest, untroubled elegy for the passages of middle-American youth, is as straightforward as it is uncommon. Working within a well-worn format — the hometown coming-of-age drama — the effect of feature-debut writer and director David Robert Mitchell’s intensely personal attention to tone and the flow of emotional currents is one of negative exposure, a setting of the genre into a stark and original relief. Conspicuous among his choices was to set and shoot the film in his native suburban Michigan and give it a largely local, unknown cast, several with twanging accents intact. The girls are built as girls that age tend to be — with variety, but tending toward awkwardness — and the boys are as small and reedy as we rarely remember them to be. In other words, it looks more like your teenage world than such films generally allow, and it’s not pretty. It’s beautiful.
Continued here:
REVIEW: Eloquent, Unusual Myth of the American Sleepover Captures the Enduring Wistfulness of Teenhood
