Teenage Wasteland

“Someone has to keep track of where everything is buried. It’s not just poison in the earth, it’s poison of the spirit as well,” notes Fred Isseks, an unconventional high school English teacher in Middletown, New York, a city 70 miles north of Manhattan that few New Yorkers have ever heard of (as confirmed by decades-old footage of a younger Isseks conducting man-on-the-street interviews). He delivers this missive while rifling through boxes of videotapes in his basement right at the start of Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s (Girls State, Boys State) September 4th Netflix-premiering Teenage Wasteland, a film I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of since Sundance 2025, where it debuted with the more mundane but perhaps less confusing title Middletown.

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