Boys Town an acclaimed doc on U.S. politics
NEW YORK — Even mock elections require wall-to-wall coverage, so when Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine set out to document Texas’ Boys State, the week-long summer camp of civics simulation run by the American Legion since 1935, they hired seven cinematographers to stay close to a handful of the 1,100 participants — all 17and 18-year-old boys, some with very real political ambition.
In the often patient and plodding world of documentary filmmaking, it was an intense pace keeping up with the campaigns of two fictional parties — the Federalists and the Nationalists — as they picked their candidates and established a party platform.
“We’re used to filming over two years, doing research. There’s a slow burn to that,” said McBaine in an interview alongside Moss, her husband. “This one was a wildfire.”
The result, Boys State, is one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the year; it took the grand jury prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It’s an uncommonly engaging, thoughtful and often funny documentary, so much so that Apple and A24 paid a Sundance record of $12 million for it. It debuted Friday on Apple TV+.
Boys State may sound like a mere mock government exercise, but the film finds in Boys State a microcosm of American politics, one that frighteningly reflects much of the tenor of today’s Washington and, in other ways, counters our more cynical grown-up government with stirring idealism. Boys State will give you both hope and fear for America’s future.
“The film is an unvarnished depiction of what we encountered,” says Moss. “And that includes the horrifying but also the profoundly moving and the uplifting.”
Boys States are run throughout the country by the American Legion, along with corresponding Girls States. Some notable names — from Bill Clinton to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh to Mark Wahlberg — have gone through the program. Moss and McBaine were unaware of Boys State before reading a 2017 Washington Post article about a first in the program’s history: Texas voted to secede.
The filmmakers sensed they had found a prism through which to view the changing nature of civic discourse in the U.S. following the election of Donald Trump. Paul Barker, then Chairman of the American Legion Texas Boys State, was impressed by McBaine and Moss’ previous film ( The Overnighters) and figured a documentary could expand the program. He had one suggestion.
“When kids are 17 years old, sometimes their mouth gets ahead of their brain,” says Barker. “But you have to see that as part of a learning process. My only caution to them was to let the needle run.”
The filmmakers, who shot the 2018 program, expected juvenile behaviour and got it. The boys, not irrationally, enact a statewide ban on pineapple pizza. But Moss and McBaine were less prepared for the emotional ride of watching some of the students find their voice.
Foremost among them is Steven Garza, a liberal-minded son of Mexican immigrants. He’s more reserved than many of his fellow high-schoolers. In an overwhelmingly white and largely conservative mass of boys, Garza stands out. Yet his underdog campaign gains momentum, rising on his own idealism and his ability to connect straightforwardly with others.
“I came out even more idealistic,” says Garza, now a 19-year-old studying politics at the University of Texas, Austin. “I knew that I could run a campaign as a brown person, a progressive person and have conservatives vote for me. Even if they didn’t believe everything I stood for, they believed that if I was elected that I would work with them to come to agreements.”