(4.5/5)

The myth of the American sleepover is a bit of an elusive concept, somehow tying in one character’s suggestion that there’s a mythic quality to teenagerhood itself – a mistaken belief that there’s something amazing and exciting about being a teenager that causes us to grow up too quickly, not appreciating the wonders of childhood before they’re lost to us forever – along with the paradox that sleepovers are something associated with childhood and yet also, in the context of the film, provide opportunities for unsupervised teenage shenanigans (many characters mock sleepovers a little even as they prepare to attend one). There are three sleepovers all together in the film, all taking place on the last night before school (the film takes place in one 24-hour period) – four if you include the much more organized and chaperoned on-campus college freshman sleepover – providing a modicum of structure to the young people who drift around in them, between them, or on the edges of them.

This ensemble cast is almost all made up of nonprofessional 15 to 19-year-olds, which sounds like a recipe for disaster, but in writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s hands, it turns out much better than you’d ever dream. Each major character has their own little plot going on – Rob wants to find a girl he saw in the supermarket and can’t forget, Maggie feels she wasted her summer in terms of finding romance and wants to rectify that before school starts the next day, Scott is drifting a bit after dropping out of college and wonders if finding a set of twins he’d crushed on in high school would help, Claudia’s new in town and tries both to find her place and assert her lack of care about fitting in, and other characters wind in and out of these plots much as people in small communities do.

And that’s the thing that really drew me into the film – it’s clearly very carefully structured, yet it doesn’t feel like it is. It feels very natural, moving from one connection to another, and from missed connections to near connections to unwanted connections. Because the heart of high school is trying to find those connections, learning who you’re going to be as an adult, and how to define yourself in relation to those around you – as cliched as all that sounds, that’s the breathing reality of what Mitchell has captured here. All the characters as written and acted felt like people I knew – as in, literally, I was going “this character reminds me of that girl I knew in college or this guy in high school.” Whether this simply made me like the film better because I related to it or whether it’s a testament to Mitchell’s ability to capture very specific characters that were real enough for me to feel like I knew them, I can’t say for sure. Perhaps some of both.

Any bits that seem slightly amateurish in editing are more than made up for by several other scenes which are subtly perfect. I rarely notice sound design, but there’s a shot here where a plot/character-handoff is handled solely by the sound of a car going by, which was a great touch. Other scenes handled the angst of teenagerhood with a grace seldom found in film, managing to leave the characters room to breathe and exist without shortchanging any plot or characterization elsewhere. With such a large cast and complex narrative structure, I initially worried about getting lost or having trouble keeping track of the characters, but I needn’t have – everything is exceptionally clear and easy to follow. It’s quite a feat of writing, and certainly helped by the cast of bright-faced unknowns, all of whom carry out their roles with captivating guilelessness.

I had this ranked at a 4/5 immediately after the festival, trying to be conservative with what might just be an initial dose of love for a film that hit most of my buttons, but as I think back about it, that love hasn’t diminished, so I’m bumping it up to a 4.5/5. That may not hold over time, but this is exactly the kind of indie film we need more of – truly independent, based on solid writing and fresh acting, yet without the sort of pretentiousness that some indies feel they need to prove their worth. The Myth of the American Sleepover isn’t trying to prove anything. It’s just trying to capture, as Mitchell said in his introduction, the beats and rhythms of those moments in our lives that seem inconsequential but actually hold more meaning than we can understand at the time. And it does that brilliantly.

Writer/Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cinematography: James Laxton
Producers: Adele Romanski, Justin Barber, Cherie Saulter, Michael Ferris Gibson
Starring: Claire Sloma, Marlon Morton, Brett Jacobsen, Amanda Bauer, Nikita Ramsay, Jade Ramsay, Wyatt McCallum, Amy Seimetz
Country: United States