Directed by Sarah Goodman. Featuring Thaddeus Ressler, Sara Miller, and Nelson Reyes. Rating unavailable.

Wanna be all that you can be? Wanna be all that you can be while getting called a worthless maggot, blindfold-assembling weapons of intimate destruction, and--more than anything else--being ordered to melt into a faceless crowd dressed in cannon-fodder green? Those are questions faced by lost-soul American youngsters who have a vague urge to find themselves and serve their country at the same time, or at least to put a stop to whatever they're currently doing. And it's one experienced, at a safe distance, by viewers of Army of One, a riveting new documentary that won the top-Canadian-feature prize at the recent Hot Docs festival in Toronto.

Director Sarah Goodman, a Concordia graduate who previously directed and produced some award-winning shorts, here follows three postadolescents wandering into the U.S. army from very different walks of life.

If the most typical recruit is Nelson Reyes, a Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who mainly wants to learn some skills and wear a sharp uniform, the most unusual is probably Thaddeus Ressler, a Chicago stockbroker whose visceral reaction to the 9/11 attacks led him to quit his career and start over in a capacity that would allow him to "make somebody pay". (Hmm, maybe it's not so different from the stock market after all.) Sara Miller is from North Carolina, wondering what to do with her degree in dance and how to live life in general.

As Goodman follows this trio from boot camp to base and back home over the course of two-plus years, there are more questions raised than resolved; I'd like to know a little bit about why Sara's gay-seeming dad seems to disapprove of her gay-seeming lifestyle, but we're dependent on appearances in this nonnarrated tale.

What's clear is that all three subjects have daddy issues. Nelson seems to lose interest in the army when he goes home on leave and his father--who earlier told the camera that a man has to figure out everything for himself--can't be bothered to notice. Next thing you know, the gung-ho soldier has done a runner and his weight has ballooned alarmingly. Thad, the most thoroughly disillusioned of the bunch, comes across as highly skeptical of his liberal, toupee-sporting papa's halfhearted encouragement to stick to "the noble thing" he's doing by staying in the army. That's even starker when you see him getting drunk with his army buddies and they start whipping each other. Sara, on the other hand, flourishes amidst the conformity.

Since filming ended last fall, much has happened to each of the participants, and a brief update will be appended to the Vancouver screenings. It's testimony to Army of One's raw power that you are left wanting more.