Review: "Boys State" is a Vital Look at the American Ideology

Scene from Boys State

One can make the argument that the AppleTV+ documentary Boys State is the most essential American movie of 2020. With an election on the horizon that has been considered one of the most crucial in this nation's history, it feels like a good time to take a hard look at the values, the way that society comes together and decides what is deemed worthy of leadership, and question what they're ultimately about. At the end of the day, nothing in Boys State matters. It's a mock election where power disappears the minute that they hop on the bus home, leaving their campaigns a distant memory. And yet, there is an intensity and importance to it that is undeniable. It's a microcosm of a bigger picture, of teenagers on the precipice of their own adult lives and running for office.

If children are our future, what can be gathered from Boys State is how much there is to be hopeful and cautious of. While there are leaders, there's also mob mentality, where candidates run solely for the rush of approval they get by compromising better values for cheap sentiment. Again, nothing really matters, and yet what co-directors Amanda McBain and Jesse Moss achieve is something profound. This is democracy in action, birthed before the viewers' eyes in ways that slowly mold into something familiar. If the future has reason to believe in change, they're going to need to try harder than bully tactics. 

The story centers around the real-life organization known as Boys State, which works to introduce young people to how democracy work by forcing them to form their own democracy and running against each other. As the opening credits suggest, future politicians ranging from Corey Booker to Vice President Dick Cheney have participated, suggesting that this is a place where the gleam in a young person's eye is born. They see the ambition and hope in forming a nation from scratch. The design, if by accident, however, is sadistic. It pits two groups against each other in a competition for the Texas state governor. They're either a Federalist or Nationalist. This isn't to say that they're the conventional form of these terms, but something they determine through town debates and compromise.

One can argue that any act of childishness is a result of them being teenage boys. People will drop phallic humor during a speech, if just to get them on their side. Others tire of talking economics because of real-life politics. There are even those who blindly admit to supporting the president because "if he looks good, the country looks good." Every facet of political ideology is being formed within these bus rides and in these halls, wandering down the street as the audience is dropped into speech writing sessions with the various candidates. There's clearly an effort to present their best selves forward, with some even finding ways to manipulate the system, creating Instagram accounts full of racist propaganda and putting the other down.

In a nutshell, this plays like a more tolerable version of the 2016 presidential election. The views are so contemporary, finding a largely conservative state battle over themes of abortion and immigration while not taking time to think about their deeper meanings. All it takes is a cheering crowd to fill the candidate with hope, making the world understand the addiction that comes with being a fantastic politician. Even then, as the level-headed boy named Rene would say, a fantastic politician isn't a compliment. It's just that you know how to cheat the system. 

While there are plenty of reasons to see this as a negative exercise, it's also a place to find hope amid the crowd. Rene understands politics much better than any other person documented, and he treats every disagreement with respect. His governor candidate campaigns on a complicated platform pulling from personal experience with gun reform and immigration. There are ideas that show hope and reason peering through this complicated texture. A whole mentality is formed in roughly a week, and it's addictive to watch, if just because it shows how quickly ideologies form, how important it is to keep a clear head when even the best may feel trapped under pressure from the world around them.

It's true that this feels painfully like a modern political campaign. In a time where the president calls every disagreeing person a foolish name, what is to stop these teenagers from doing the same? They have learned political strategy from the worst possible study, and it's scary how much it threatens to dismantle the entire organization. There's so much in-fighting and secession talk that at times it feels like Boys State would become an anarchist program. Even if it doesn't always go according to plan, it does wind up being something fulfilling, giving those who take it seriously a chance to understand how campaigning works on a granular level. When you're caught up in it, there's a good chance that nothing feels more important. In fact, that's likely how people like Booker and Cheney felt coming out of it.

With a modern presidential election currently underway and the "us vs. them" mentality being even worse than usual, Boys State feels like a vital documentary that is necessary to understand so much of the American ideology. It may not get anyone anything, but the fight for power creates a mixture of the addictive narrative builds and haunting plot twists that feel plucked from the best dramatists. The issue is that Boys State reveals how ingrained this type of competitive campaigning is in the American DNA. As much good comes from this, there's still a need to do better, to teach the world to better and take things seriously. By using this as a case study, it helps to explain the adults they will become, that everyone who ever stepped foot into the program will be. It's a study of how order from chaos is formed, and even then the chaos is never fully destroyed. It's just about knowing how to control and become a good leader in spite of it.