"As much as you hate to think it, some stereotypes are true."

That's one of the admissions made by local teens who got together to preview "American Teen," a documentary that follows Indiana teens through their senior year of high school.

The film's pretty accurate, according to a dozen 13- to 18-year-olds invited to see it in Honolulu.

Warsaw High School lacks the diversity of high schools in Hawai'i, but while the look is different, the archetypes, the cliques, the pressure and the pain are all too familiar.

What it boils down to is that high school is rough — whether you're a queen bee or an artistic rebel, a star athlete or a band geek, or just someone who falls in between ... or, worse, through the cracks.

However, the teens in the movie and the teens who watched it also recognize that high school — senior year in particular — is a time of transition, a chance to discover yourself before leaving childhood behind.

"High school is not about who's the most popular or who gets the best grades," said Radford High School senior Michael Forgue. "It's about being yourself and understanding what you want to do for the rest of your life."

As might be expected in a documentary about high schoolers, "American Teen" is fraught with angst. While one student wants to get into "the" college, another needs a scholarship from any college, or he's headed for the military.

One teen deals with crippling anxiety after a breakup, while another remains ever optimistic that he'll find love, even in the face of multiple rejections.

But perhaps the biggest pressure comes from peers.

In this particular film, the "popular" kids use peer pressure to make their schoolmates miserable — sometimes out of spite, sometimes, it seems, out of mere boredom.

In one sequence, topless photos of a high schooler get e-mailed to just about everyone, spread in part by a gleeful student who had referred to the topless girl as one of her good friends just a few scenes before.

Alyssa Fukumoto, a senior at Radford High School, said it upset her to see that a "close friend" not only helped circulate offending photos, but also harassed the targeted girl over the phone.

"I had friends that did something similar, and a true friend would be there for you in those kinds of situations," she said.

The documentary didn't really offer examples of "true" friends, however. "What bothered me about the movie was how almost every teen forgot who they were because they felt the need to please other people. The more and more they listened to their friends, the more and more they lost that connection with themselves," said Katie Ka'ahanui, a senior at Kalani High School.

"That's why they felt lost, started getting into trouble (and) always felt depressed."

MEAN GIRLS

Megan, the "princess" among the "American Teen" cast, is complex: a stellar student involved in several extracurricular activities, popular enough to be voted into the student government despite a cruel streak that turns off members of the audience.

She's like a villain in a Disney movie due for some comeuppance, except the documentary isn't a fairy tale, and her Queen Bee attitude gets her crowned prom queen.

Girls who watched the film said the cliques at their schools aren't as well-defined, but they've all encountered peers who are so convinced they're better than everyone else that other people end up believing them.

As Fukumoto noted, "The most popular people weren't necessarily the best-looking or the richest." Instead, they were self-confident, hard-working and ambitious, she said.

WHERE ARE THE DRUGS?

While the documentary shows some vandalism, underage drinking and a bit of cigarette smoking, drugs are a nonissue in the film, but a huge issue in local high schools.

"One thing I felt was missing was the common struggle among Hawai'i teens to resist drugs and alcohol. This may not be much of an issue in Indiana, but it certainly is a pressing matter in Hawai'i," said Scott Mailheau, the student body president at Damien High School, a Catholic all-boys school.

One public school student said the drug problem is pretty obvious to students at her school, but teachers seem oblivious, or at least disengaged. One of her classmates regularly came to class reeking of pot, with no intervention from authority figures, she said.

THE REBEL

The darling of the film is Hannah, an aspiring filmmaker who can't find a niche in Warsaw and wants to get far away from Indiana and turn out differently from her parents.

Hannah, an artist, musician and rebel, resonates with teen audiences who respect her for daring to be different at an age where many people are more desperate to fit in.

"I really liked that she was able to be who she was and express herself, even under the stress of peer pressure," Mailheau said.

His classmate at Damien, Kristian Liwanag, liked Hannah's determination to follow her dreams, despite her parents' objections.

While some in the group thought Hannah didn't treat her parents with enough respect, others said it went both ways — especially since her parents had left her to live with her grandmother.

THE OUTCAST

While Hannah seems to revel in her differences with her classmates, Jake is a band geek who desperately wants to fit in, but ends up playing video games to compensate for having few friends.

All the main characters recognize that senior year is something to get through before moving on to the next phase of their lives, but Jake is the one who seems to cling most to the promise of being able to reinvent himself once he could move away to college and shed his high school persona.

Mailheau said those transitions really can be transformational, and described himself as a "dork" in middle school who managed to become student body president his last year in high school.

But Mailheau — an honors student and the school mascot — doesn't feel he fits into any particular category.

"Overall, I'm one of the more well-known students, definitely an in-betweener, with a little nerd thrown in there, and that's just where I want to be," he said.