White Boy Rick

Cert: 15A; Now showing The difficulty with any stunning debut is how to follow it up. Yann Demange’s debut, ’71, was widely acclaimed and deservedly so. Four years later his second feature, White Boy Rick, is perhaps suffering in comparison, but I believe it is also paying the price for its subject matter.

Logan and Noah Miller have written the film based on the true story of Rick Wershe Jr who was 15 when he was recruited by the FBI as an informant. It was Detroit in 1985 and the height of a crack cocaine epidemic against which Nancy Reagan was spearheading a moral crusade. Rick (Richie Merritt) lives with his gun-dealer father (Matthew McConaughey) and, until she runs off, his drugaddicted sister Dawn (Bel Powley). His nickname comes from being one of the few white kids in the gang led by Johnny Curry (Jonathan Majors). FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) recruit Rick by threatening to jail his father. They later set him up as a dealer and although he gets out, going straight doesn’t offer many lucrative options for blue-collar workers in depressed Detroit.

It is a bit long and the pacing is off in places but the characters are realistic and the performances really good. Criticism of the film’s apparently ambiguous morality about drugs to me misses the point because the film instead looks at how drugs-are-bad moralising conveniently bypassed all other moral issues like class, race and recruiting children whose childhood decisions would affect the rest of their lives.