109 min | PG-13 | August 14, 2020 | A24
A thousand Texas teenage boys gather to build a mock government from scratch in a single week. They split into two parties, run campaigns, and fight for the governorship. The result is the cleanest X-ray of American politics you will ever see.
Every summer the American Legion drops eleven hundred seventeen-year-old boys in Texas into a week-long simulation of representative democracy. They elect officials, write platforms, and campaign for the top prize of governor. Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss follow four of them through the chaos. The film is not about teenagers playing politics. It is about how fast a roomful of decent kids learns that winning rewards cynicism, tribalism, and the willingness to say whatever the crowd wants to hear.
Steven Garza is the heart of the film. He is a quiet progressive in a sea of red-meat conservatism, and he runs a campaign built on persuasion rather than applause lines. René Otero arrives as one of the few Black kids in the room and turns out to be the sharpest political operator present, watching the mob form and naming exactly what he sees. Robert MacDougall figures out that he can win by abandoning his actual beliefs and performing the version of himself the audience wants. Ben Feinstein runs the opposing party as a backroom strategist who treats opposition research and dirty mailers as a game he intends to win. The four of them together map the whole spectrum from idealism to ruthlessness without anyone writing them a line.
McBaine and Moss shoot in pure verite, embedding cameras inside the rallies and the hallway negotiations until the boys forget they are being watched. The editing is the real engine. Cuts between the soaring campaign speeches and the cold tactical conversations expose the gap between what these kids say and what they do. The handheld camera stays low in the crowd during the floor votes, so the viewer feels the heat and the herd pressure building in real time. The filmmakers refuse narration and let the contradictions sit on screen.
This is a documentary about a children’s exercise that plays like a thriller about the country. The boys reproduce gerrymandering, secession rhetoric, and weaponized social media without any adult telling them to. The film finds its tension in a simple question. It asks whether anyone can win this game while telling the truth, and it has the nerve to show you the answer.