Delayed Reaction: Boys State

Premise: A documentary about an event where 1100 high school boys in Texas build a fictional government.

 

In high school, I went on something called a Christian Awakening retreat (Catholic All-Boy high school). It was a 3-day event where 50-ish of the guys in my class went to a cabin, heard a bunch of talks about our religion, broke into small discussion groups, and bonded. A lot of people came out of that pretty profoundly changed and still speak highly about the experience. For me, not so much. I was a little quiet life-long atheist*. I never cared for teenage boys even when I was one. I'm not one to open up to people I barely knew (and none of my friends were in my small group). So, other than getting a couple days off from school, this was a complete waste of my time and not an experience I look back on that fondly.

 

*I spent most of my childhood believing Christianity like bed time stories. Then, around fifth grade, it finally occurred to me that not believing was an option. Not an "angry at god atheist" here. Just one never believed in it.
 

I had a lot of flashbacks to my Christian Awakening retreat watching Boys State. There's a Lord of the Flies aspect to Boys State that made it a Sundance hit. People are fascinated by seeing a bunch of mostly conservative high school boys in a lightly-supervised setting. I lived it. That made my experience a bit different than for most people watching this. I almost can't rate this fairly, because I spent so much of my time reliving unpleasant experiences from high school*. I remember how obnoxious it could be in a room of 100+ high school boys doing anything. I'm more of a "small room with people I chose" kind of guy.

 

*For the record, I had a mostly good high school experience. I wasn't picked on. I had good friends. Except for the whole 9/11 thing, it was pretty much a best-case scenario. It just wasn't my scene a lot of the time. 

 

Still, Boys State is a good documentary if I can take out my own flashbacks. The movie does an astounding job selecting the young men to follow. They didn't follow a dozen people and cut 8 of them out in the final cut. They followed those four and had a fifth who they dropped pretty early on. That is an all-time win for documentary casting. The process of the Boys State event is pretty messy, and the documentary cuts it together pretty cleanly. It's clear that this was made by filmmakers who are more liberal than most of the boys at the event, but it's really not a documentary about making one side look better than the other. The experiment is more about political strategy and how to refine talking points. The two sides have to build party platforms that get people on board. People have to make speeches calibrated to avoid turning off their audience. Taking a hard stand and debating real topics is actually to one's detriment. We should really pause on that last sentence for a moment.  

 

There's so much going on here that they probably could've tripled the size of the production crew and made this into a series and still not caught everything. Like, what's up with those band kids? I get the sense that they are just there for band and don't care about the politics stuff. And why is there a talent show? Who decides who can run the event podcasts?

There's also a Girls State event that the filmmakers plan to make as a follow up to this eventually. I'm much more interested in seeing that, since I won't have war flashbacks about those rooms. That's more of a personal perspective though. I imagine Boys State will be plenty informative for anyone who didn't have four years of being around only high school boys already. 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend