We have been tracking the progress of David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover ever since it toured the 2010 film festival circuit, where it picked up a Special Jury Prize for the Best Ensemble Cast at SXSW, played the Cannes Film Festival, and scored a Producers Award nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards. As the film finally prepares to open wide, we’re getting our first look at the official trailer, posted below (courtesy of Apple, where you can see the video in HD):
Mitchell’s Sleepover, according to an official synopsis, follows four suburban teenagers navigating the complicated wastelands of adolescent love on the last weekend of the summer in Detroit. At first glance, it calls to mind American Pie without the filthy bathroom humor. The trailer, however, suggests an array of cinematic influences, from the filmography of John Hughes (who gets name-checked any time a film focuses on awkward teenage characters) to the pop-music-sensitive wistfulness of Zach Braff’s Garden State. If nothing else, Myth sounds like it’s going to supply us with a killer alt-rock soundtrack for our end-of-summer iTunes mixes.
Yet even though it has a significant amount of festival play, and top critics are quoted in the clip, Sleepover only has one review on Rotten Tomatoes at this time, where Thomas Caldwell of Cinema Autopsy says “the film’s restraint and reliance on non-professional actors ends up creating something that often feels stilted and unintentionally absurd rather than naturalistic.”
Oddly enough, it was the docu-drama appearance of Mitchell’s cinematography and the unrehearsed performances of the teen actors in the trailer that made me think Sleepover would be something different and possibly special. I’m going in with an open mind when the film opens later this year.
