Nanette Burstein is interested in people and skilled at turning their accounts into clear, watchable stories. We value that curiosity, though her documentaries can look too tidily arranged, and her move into comedy has had uneven results.
Fi1m perspective
In American Teen (2008), observational footage shares space with animation and stylised sequences that suggest what its high-school subjects are thinking. Burstein is willing to step away from what a camera can record to show something less easily visible. We appreciate the effort, though the carefully structured storylines can make us wonder how much untidiness has been removed from these lives.
Her early collaborations with Brett Morgen established that willingness to try different methods. On the Ropes (1999) follows young boxers, while The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) uses animation and narration to tell producer Robert Evans’s story. After going solo with American Teen, Burstein made her first narrative feature, the romantic comedy Going the Distance (2010). It was a plausible move for a director interested in character, although the coarse humour sits awkwardly beside the more sincere passages, and the pacing is uneven.
Her episodic work includes New Girl (2011), which she directed for in 2012. We grew fond of the group once Jess’s awkwardness stopped being the whole joke and the friendships had room to matter. Zooey Deschanel is good company, but the ensemble gives the programme reasons to return beyond its central performance. The romantic plotting sometimes works harder than it needs to; even with that reservation, this is a comedy we warmly recommend. There is a limit to what it tells us about Burstein, however: we would not assign the friendships’ success or the plotting’s failings to one of a programme’s directors.
Her later work has returned primarily to documentaries, with Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes (2024) constructed from more than 40 hours of unreleased audio interviews. Such material suits her interest in personal accounts and her ability to organise a substantial amount of footage or testimony. Our reservation is how much room her shaping leaves for someone to be inconsistent or difficult to explain. Start with The Kid Stays in the Picture if animation in a documentary sounds like an unnecessary complication.
Biography
Nanette Burstein is an American film and television director, producer and screenwriter. She was born in Buffalo, New York, on 23 May 1970 and studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
She began her career co-directing the documentary On the Ropes (1999) with Brett Morgen. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and the Sundance Special Jury Prize. Her other documentary credits include The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) and American Teen (2008). She has also directed the narrative feature Going the Distance (2010) and episodes of series including New Girl (2012) and Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 (2012), as well as the series Hillary (2020) and Killer Sally (2022).
