review for High School Record on AllMovie

If 1950s Juvenile Delinquency dramas like The Blackboard Jungle and The Cool and the Crazy were influenced the rebellious sneer of early rock & roll and 1980s teen flicks such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club reflected the sleeker and more stylish tones of arena rock and the commercial end of new wave, High School Record is an independent variation on the teen film ethos that bears more than a passing resemblance to indie rock, full of artfully awkward silences, fractured narrative lines, self-conscious clumsiness and a dry, snarky wit that could have come right out of a Pavement album. The fact that High School Record is an obviously phony mockumentary plays into this logic (it takes place in the most miraculously underpopulated high school in the continental United States), and the film's clunky artifice serves as the cinematic equivalent of the air-quote irony of slacker culture, and one of the few genuine and sincere moments in the film comes from an unexpected source -- Mike Watt of the Minutemen and fIREHOSE has a brief cameo as a father struggling with cancer, and Watt not only seems to have avoided the elaborate artifice of a character, he appears to be playing himself, and it's hard to say if sexually enthusiastic Sabrina (played by Jenna Thornhill) is supposed to be the daughter of a legendary punk musician or if this is just another unexpected level in the movie's jumble of signifiers. High School Records isn't helped by the fact most of the cast is made up of musicians, who have some idea how to play to an audience but aren't much on character, making some of the performances annoyingly one-dimensional (though for the record, the worst offender in the film, Bobby Sandoval as Eddie, is supposed to be a bone fide actor, while singer Becky Stark comes in at a close second as a ditsy teacher). But when the movie hits its target, it's both funny and oddly charming, and Thornhill and Dean Spunt have genuine romantic and comic chemistry as a geeky par of teenage lovers whose awkwardness isn't that far removed from real life. Pacing and narrative are not Wolfinsohn's strong suits, but he has a sharp eye for interesting framings, and High School Record works just well enough that one imagines with the help of the right screenwriter he could make a small scale triumph some day.