Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss
Running time: 1 hour and 49 Minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic elements

by Ian Hrabe

There’s a moment about halfway through Boys State when everything just clicks. It’s one of those intangibles that makes being a film fan such an intense joy. At first you’re just along for the ride, but when the film’s true motive becomes clear it is exhilarating. It helps that the premise of Boys State is a surefire attention grabber. Every year the American Legion hosts a program in each state where 1100 17-year-old boys (girls have a separate Girls State program) are put together and made to craft a representative government (with two hypothetical political parties--Nationalist and Federalist– with the highest office being governor, but also including representatives, court justices, etc) amongst themselves. Boys State chronicles Texas’s 2018 Boys State program, and the dose of Texas sized energy gives the film an extra gear that you wouldn’t get from, say, Boys State Delaware. The end result is a film that plays out like the Model U.N. by way of Lord of the Flies and it is one of the most engrossing movies of the year.

While that premise is juicy enough, what makes Boys State a can’t miss winner is the characters it follows. Yes, this is a documentary, and yes these are real boys, but the way the drama unfolds is borderline Shakespearean. There’s Robert Macdougall, who attempts to win the program’s governorship on the back of his popular kid charm and hardline conservative politics that come from his privileged upbringing. There’s Rene Otero, one of the only African American kids at the program (at one point he says “I’ve never seen so many white people ever”), who somehow manages to win over the generally conservative group with his excellent debating skills and a sky high charisma that makes him come across like a character straight out of Hamilton.

Then there’s Ben Feinstein, a bilateral amputee who lost both of his legs and full use of one of his arms due to an early childhood case of meningitis, who is the most ruthlessly determined of the bunch which would be great if his neocon politics (he has an action figure of Ronald Reagan in his room) weren’t so incredibly broken. He has the passion and energy you love to see, but the ideas he is preaching are terrifying and toxic which, for all intents and purposes, sets him up as the film’s villain. And he’s a truly compelling villain at that, in that he truly believes what he is doing is right, even when what he is doing is downright cruel.

Finally there’s Steven Garza, the story’s improbable hero. In a sea of deeply conservative white boys, Garza--who is Latino--shows up in his Beto O’Rourke t-shirt. In an environment where boys loudly espouse their pro-gun, anti-abortion views, Garza quietly preaches moderate politics with compassionate common sense. Where most of the other characters (Rene excepted) offer a horrifying look at the backwards views espoused by a certain segment of the youth of today, Steven Garza is a beacon of hope. A glimmer of hope that the future might not be totally screwed.

When Garza tells us he is running for Governor, you can’t help but feel sympathy for him because everything about him seems to run counter to the personalities he is looking to lead. You wonder if he can even get the 30 signatures required to run for the office, but it’s here that you see that of the 1000+ kids here, Steven Garza is the one who would legitimately make the best politician. Unlike MacDougall who is all chummy flash with a Matthew McConaughey swagger but no real ideas or desire to do anything but win, Garza actually listens to the people. He wants to earn their signatures, and where others are playing the program like a game (which makes for a pretty fantastic twist later on in the film), Garza is treating this as both an opportunity for growth and a test run for an actual political campaign.

Steven Garza is a pure, perfect underdog, and after the film gets past the chaotic introduction to Boys State and settles into the race for governor, the newfound focus takes the documentation of a fascinating social experiment into the realm of sublime human drama. It’s an enthralling look inside the heads of 17-year-old, male America, and as inspiring as Steven Garza and Rene Otero’s stories are (they are what the American Dream, or whatever is left of it, actually looks like), if Boys State is anything, it is a cautionary tale of the toxic masculinity that has already infected so much of America’s young men.

It’s absolutely chilling to watch gubernatorial candidate after gubernatorial candidate go up and espouse the immorality of abortion without a single woman in the room. Or to hear them yell about guns and dominating their foes. The Boys State group from 2017 voted to secede from Texas, and it’s something that is proposed by some of the members of the Nationalist Party that Otero chairs. When he shoots this down, these party members start yelling to impeach him, and you worry for Otero’s spot until he asks all those in favor of impeaching him to stand up. The dozen or so kids who stood up are promptly booed by the hundred or so who remained seated, and it’s a genuine thrill to see these obnoxious little brats so brilliantly put into their place.

Unfortunately moments like that are few and far between, and as the race between Otero’s Nationalist candidate Garza and Feinstein’s Federalist candidate Eddy (who Feinstein describes as having heard other people describe him as “a young Ben Shapiro” tells you all you need to know) heats up, Feinstein turns to dirty politics to take down Garza. Watching Garza counter this mudslinging with quiet grace is incredible, but there is an edge to the film that shows that even if you have a glimmer of hope, you’re still living mostly in darkness. It becomes a battle of people who have ideals versus people who have none and just want to win and dominate the competition by any means necessary, and it’s an unfortunate dark mirror to the way politics operate in real life.

Rene Otero has a lot of the film’s best lines, but the most insightful of them is when he is discussing how his friends told him Boys State was just a conservative indoctrination camp, but he argued that this is something every liberal needs. This pairs well with Steven Garza’s strategy of putting his personal convictions aside in an effort to find common sense solutions that can reach across the aisle and make both sides happy. Both young men have wisdom beyond their years that a lot of politicians could learn from, if they would only listen. So often the voice of the youth is silenced or not taken seriously and, though Boys State illustrates that plenty of young people have some absolutely terrible ideas about how the world should work, there are some that can show us a better way forward as a country.

Boys State is now streaming on Apple TV+.