‘White Boy Rick’ a true tale of teen drug dealer
Based on the true story of Rick Wershe Jr., who at age 14 was the youngest informant in FBI history, “White Boy Rick” tells a very tricky, Scorsese-like tale of Rick (strong first-timer Richie Merritt), a young man we first meet in 1984 as he accompanies his father to a Michigan gun show, where they scam a scammer to the tune of Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues” out of two AK47s Wershe senior intends to sell for a big profit on the mean streets of an economically ravaged Detroit.
Yes, these are not exactly pillars of society. Rick, who is named after his father, Richard (a strong but one-note Matthew McConaughey), and sports a mop of hair and fuzzy down on his upper lip, lives with his dad and his older sister, Dawn (Bel Powley, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”), who has a boyfriend and a drug problem, in what might be described as suburban Detroit neighborhoods turned slums.
Richard, Rick and Dawn live across the street from Richard’s elderly father, Roman (Bruce Dern), and mother, Verna (Piper Laurie), who look disapprovingly upon the behavior of the younger generation. Richard tells his son they’re “lions” and sends him to sell the AKs to an African-American Detroit drug dealer, who adopts “White Boy Rick” as a sort of mascot.
FBI agents Frank Byrd (Rory Cochrane) and Alex Snyder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) lean on Richard about the guns. Later, Byrd, Snyder and Detroit drug Detective Jackson (Brian Tyree Henry) lean on 14-year-old Rick, who helps them learn how Detroit drug houses operate in exchange for money.
Unlike such Scorsese films as “GoodFellas,” “White Boy Rick” lacks dark comedy, unless you count Powley chasing her boyfriend’s Firebird down the street in her underwear, and its characters have little of the operatic charisma of Scorsese’s gangsters. Except for a moving scene in which he and Rick rescue Dawn from a crack house, paterfamilias Richard is a dirt bag, although he claims he wants to reform.
Merritt delivers a powerful performance, but Rick is like a bad grammar machine headed down a dead-end highway at 120 mph unless he goes to school (why he doesn’t is one of the mysteries left unaddressed).
The film was directed by Paris-born Yann Demange, whose previous credits include “’71,” a 2014 film about the Troubles in Northern
Ireland and whose knowledge of Detroit in the 1980s and the American justice system may be limited. Evan Hughes, the author of the biography “The Trials of White Boy Rick,” claims the film uses his work without compensation or credit. The truth is a lot more AfricanAmericans were sent up the river for life because of draconian and unequal drug laws. “White Boy Rick” is worth a look for its cast and performances. But the film has issues.