ONE OF THE numerous brief running gags in Todd Graff's Camp involves the forlorn sports director of a summer performing arts retreat; when the staff's resident jock playfully tosses a football to one toothy blond boy-femme cherub, all he receives in return is an exasperated stare. Filmed at Stagedoor Manor, the upstate New York drama compound where Robert Downey Jr. and Jennifer Jason Leigh first cultivated their mannerisms, Graff's movie never misses an opportunity to emphasize that its setting – renamed "Camp Ovation" – is a rare place where homecoming kings are outnumbered by drama queens. In contrast, Scott Hamilton Kennedy's documentary OT: Our Town zeroes in on an educational site of distorted, rather than reversed, norms: Compton's Manuel Dominguez High School, where, for two decades, the chief public stage has been a basketball court.

OT: Our Town's local release is well timed; the coming-of-age tales in Graff's fictive feature and Kennedy's D.V. documentary share many motifs: athletics versus dramatics; teen portraiture; show-must-go-on plotlines driven by the desire to update American theatrical tradition. In most cases, the comparisons favor OT: Our Town. Yes, Camp's fiercest performance – a climactic ballad by VH1 Born to Diva winner Sasha Allen – transcends American Idol territory, and it certainly trumps the high-gloss low-talent equation of 2003 Oscar darling Chicago. Structured like a musical, Graff's screenplay treats St. Stephen Sondheim to complicated in-joke irreverence. But when Camp steps outside the theater, each character remains trapped within surface-level typecast armor. Perhaps life really is a stage, and the roles are inhibiting.

If so, Kennedy's movie at least confronts that conundrum boldly. Documenting a high school production of Our Town, he questions, observes, and affirms a brash attempt at making Thornton Wilder's chestnut relevant to contemporary Compton. OT: Our Town's first few seconds illustrate the pop-cultural chasm, ricocheting from Ice Cube's "Straight outta Compton" defiance to the pure corn of Hal Holbrook in a '70s-era TV production of the Wilder play. As a pair of high school teachers reconstruct Our Town in the image of the students and their families, Kennedy takes advantage of the access his movie director status provides to elaborate on the project; he steps out of the school and into different hangouts and homes.

Holbrook may be hundreds of corn fields away from NWA, but Ice Cube doesn't necessarily speak for OT: Our Town's teens: Korn, Trent Reznor, and Justin Timberlake are three chosen totems. The Korn fan, a girl named Ebony, offers sardonic observations about Dominguez High's schedule of "homecoming, riots, prom, and graduation," an agenda that hasn't included staged plays for 21 years. Initially suspicious, Ebony says she doesn't want "to reiterate stereotypes of gangbangers and hoochie mamas"; when she offers a tour of her home life, Kennedy frequently frames her face in extreme close-up, as if to place a visual exclamation mark behind each articulate comment. Still, the movie's depth stems from spontaneity, not style. A nighttime parking-lot interview is interrupted by the sound of drive-by gunfire. 'N Sync fanatic Jackie is thrilled when she's picked up by a limo for prom, only to discover that the driver had stopped at the wrong house. Senior and soon-to-be-Chicago-Bull Tyson Chandler is asked if he'll be attending the play. His answer is a charismatic shrug.

OT: Our Town and Camp play with cross-cultural divides from markedly different angles. Graff's framing of a whitewashed version of Dreamgirls has bite, but when a Camp counselor lambastes a white, suburban trio for their misapprehension of Miguel Piñero, the scene is played to be cute. Bypassing such glib brevity, Kennedy structures his movie to follow Our Town's three-act progression from daily life, to love and marriage, to death. As Reznor devotee José (seen reading Hiroshima Diary at one point) battles with a teacher while the hours before opening night dwindle, his angry nihilism fits the play's – and the movie's – narrative path: José has just talked about his, and his friends', suicide attempts.