Movies Similar to Teen Spirit: Teenagers and Hollywood

The Perfect Selfie(2017)

Teenager Olivia Oras has 20,000 Instagram followers. The documentary follows a year of her life.

My Life Inside(2007)

Rosa is a Mexican woman who, at the age of 17, migrated illegally to Austin, Texas. Some years later, she was jailed under suspicion of murder and then taken to trial. This film demonstrates how the judicial process, the verdict, the separation from her family, and the helplessness of being imprisoned in a foreign country make Rosa’s story an example of the hard life of Mexican migrants in the United States.

6.9

American Teen(2008)

A documentary on seniors at a high school in a small Indiana town and their various cliques.

6.4

Los posibles(2013)

Santiago Mitre co-directs his first movement following The Student together with choreographer Onofri Barbato. Although it would have been more accurate to say “his first film-story-adventure-movie-great movie following The Student”, the word movement fits perfectly in Los posibles, the most overwhelmingly kinetic work Argentine cinema has delivered in many, many years. The film deals with the adaptation of a dance show directed by Onofri together with a group of teenagers who came to Casa La Salle, a center of social integration located in González Catán, trying to find some refuge from hardship. Already entitled Los posibles, the piece opened in the La Plata Tacec and was later staged in the AB Hall of the San Martín Cultural Center. Now, it dazzles audiences out of a film screen, with extraordinary muscles and a huge heart: Los posibles is a rhapsody of roughen bodies and torn emotions. Precise and exciting, it’s our own delayed, necessary, and incandescent West Side Story.

7.0

Children of the Arctic(2014)

Children of the Arctic is a portrait of five Native Alaskan teenagers growing up in Barrow - the northernmost community in the United States. As their climate and culture undergo profound changes, they strive to balance being modern American kids and the inheritors of an endangered way of life.

9.0

Maineland(2017)

Chinese teenagers from the wealthy elite, with big American dreams, settle into a boarding school in small-town Maine. As their fuzzy visions of the American dream slowly gain more clarity, their relationship to home takes on a poignant new aspect.

4.6

Streetwise(1984)

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.

7.5

BRATS(2024)

In the 1980s, Andrew McCarthy was part of a young generation of actors who were set to take over Hollywood after a string of successful teen movies. However, when the New York magazine cover story in 1985 dubs them the Brat Pack, stars in the making suddenly find themselves losing control over the trajectory of their careers. Now, almost forty years later, McCarthy looks to reconnect with peers and co-stars so that together they can reflect on their respective legacies.

6.0

Diary of a Teenage Nudist(2004)

Documentary from the point of view of a now 18 year old girl who grew up in a nudist colony.

2.5

Lost for Life(2013)

A documentary about juveniles who are serving life in prison without parole and their victims' families.

6.3

Young Solitude(2018)

Claire Simon portrays an important time for any individual, from 16 to 18 years of age. Set in the Paris suburbs in high school (for those lucky enough to go), teenagers chat after and even during class, sitting in the hallway or outside on a bench, looking at the city below them.

6.6

E. T., an Emotional Blockbuster(2022)

E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg's endearing movie released in 1982, achieved the triple feat of bringing to life one of the most iconic characters in pop culture, revolutionizing science fiction cinema and establishing itself as one of the highest-grossing family movies in the history of cinema, capable of making the whole world laugh and cry.

6.7

Ultraviolet(2019)

In Vancouver, British Columbia, two teenagers attempt to create a feature length documentary about their lives. The main character James (played by himself) becomes obsessed with the project and is pushed into a more introverted, lonely existence. His best friend Quinn (played by himself) sets out to help him, but is met with the real answer as to why James is keeping himself inside: the rejection of what he thinks is the love of his life. The two of them go their separate ways, with James going deeper into a depression he’s not sure he can escape from.

0.0

Teenage(2013)

Teenagers did not exist before the 20th century. Not until the early 1950s did the term gain widespread recognition, but "Teenage" offers compelling evidence that teenagers had a tumultuous effect on the previous half-decade.

6.3

Rara Avis(2020)

On a sailboat in the middle of the Ocean, five teenagers in rehabilitation are travelling with adults of different ages and backgrounds. Off unknown coastlines, the boat’s space becomes a huis-clos in which everyone faces their own difficulties, the challenge of living together and also the manoeuvres of sailing, the Ocean and its turmoil—until the arrival on land.

0.0

All This Panic(2017)

Shot over a three-year period with unparalleled intimacy and access, ALL THIS PANIC is a feature length documentary that takes an intimate look at the interior lives of a group of teenage girls as they come of age in Brooklyn. A potent mix of vivid portraiture and vérité, we follow the girls as they navigate the ephemeral and fleeting transition between childhood and adulthood.

6.2

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The Commons(2022)

A group of teenagers go out to a den in the woods for a night of drinking, unaware that their behaviour touches on issues of ritual, folklore, mysticism and UFOs.

0.0

ZONA/(2020)

Milan, western suburbs. In one of the nine districts ("zone") of the city, the students of the "Rosa Luxemburg" trade school meditate over the meaning of living in the suburbs. And they do so using their smartphones, filming their days and looking for a common thread among their lives. Crossing and mixing video-diaries, documentary shooting and fictional scenes, the project struggles to take a definite shape: every character and perspective channels the tale in a different direction, escaping from linear narrative lines and bringing us to some kind of archipelago.

0.0

The Making of Back to the Future(1986)

The Making of 'Back to the Future'

7.6

Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower(2017)

When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents.

7.3