The stories in “American Teen” are old, familiar narratives that are a part of the stubbornly persistent stereotypes of the high-school experience. Director Nanette Burstein descended on a public high school in Warsaw, Ind. and filmed the jock, the nerd, the princess, the outsider and the handsome guy for 10 months. Each lead — Colin, Jake, Megan, Hannah and Mitch, respectively — has the appropriate personality and corresponding clichéd goal as the film begins, and the story follows each of them through the requisite steps of senior year and on toward graduation.

The easy criticism to make is that the movie imposes and fashions narratives upon the less cooperative material of real life. Burstein has claimed repeatedly that her film is authentic and its episodes natural. She is lying. Conversations supposedly taking place months apart feature the teens wearing the same outfits and sitting in the same positions, the number of serendipitous close-ups surpasses normal good fortune and the complete nonchalance of non-lead characters when faced with a camera all testify to the movie playing games with whatever really happened. All documentaries do this, however, and no one would expect Burstein to torpedo the careful efforts of her marketers.

“American Teen” truly sins by being relentlessly tedious. The five leads display an impressive dedication to act exactly as expected in any situation. Jake, the nerd, rockets awkwardness at any available target. Megan, royalty within a petty and small-minded social structure, does petty and small-minded things to assert her position. Even external events and institutions are accommodating, from the three-point defense of Warsaw’s basketball rivals to the decisions made by their colleges of choice.

It is tempting to give Burstein the benefit of the doubt here and say that she had the dismal luck to choose a town and a cast too typical for its own good. But the deliberate choice of characters who fit the grand stereotypes, the manipulation of the footage and her enthusiastic acceptance of face-value labels and situations indicate that she mostly got the movie she wanted.

When the students freely speculate about their lives and futures, Burstein avoids inconvenient complexity by laying their words over simplistic animated sequences; she transforms vulnerable and revealing speculation into illustrations of how misguided they are. Wherever the rote run-through of life at its most routine was supposed to lead us, we certainly arrive, though the film is too polite to tell us anything about what this accomplishes. Nor do we learn much about the inner lives of the documentary’s cast, who weren’t allowed to venture off-script. They’re clearly real and sympathetic people, but this is inferred rather than demonstrated.

None of this, of course, will prevent “American Teen” from receiving dutiful accolades. A chorus of people far removed from high school will seize upon their reasons to lavish it with praise, and that is okay. The film’s barely-concealed contempt for the real people it follows and self-satisfaction at its run through old standards is harmless. The production left no one’s life in ruins, and the film cannot even manage to be offensive. It is merely lazy. Burstein is systematic and dogged in her dedication to ignore, wall up and otherwise avoid the rough edges of life at its most interesting. If there is anything of high-school experience that the film evokes perfectly, as its now-graduated subjects could attest, it is the grim monotony of a study hall.