‘Boys State,” a hugely entertaining and scarily edifying documentary by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, pulls you in with the power of its premise. Once you know what it’s about, you’re eager to know what it reveals. (The film is streaming on Apple TV+.)
Boys State the national institution—there’s a Girls State too—is a civics education program, sponsored by the American Legion, that’s been around since the mid-1930s. The idea is to bring high-school juniors together in each of the United States for a weeklong exercise that involves building their own state government. The participants, randomly assigned to one of two political parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, decide among themselves what their parties stand for, campaign for support and build coalitions if possible, then hold mock elections for state offices that culminate in a gubernatorial race. (Previous participants include Lamar Alexander, Samuel Alito, Cory Booker, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh.) In the film, which was shot in 2018 in Texas, 1,000 or so young men descend on Austin, the state capital, to play out their version of contemporary electoral politics. The compelling question is whether the process will be as polarized, savage and dispiriting as its counterpart in what passes these days for real life.
The answer is yes, to a ghastly degree—there’s plenty of vituperation, misrepresentation, banal slogans and attack ads (on Instagram). But the kids’ aspirations and machinations are complicated, and occasionally heartening. A few of them want more than the toxic endorphins of crushing, dominating or, to use the chilling words of the favorite for Party Chairman of the Federalists, pressuring the other party “into an absolute state of submission.” These outliers are searching for, and in several cases embodying, a spirit of reconciliation, a reason for hope.
It’s easy to imagine one of them, the son of an undocumented mother (who later became a legal resident), being described as a previous Boys State participant in a future when he’s holding a position of national leadership. That’s not just a spectator’s judgment. Several of his peers in both the Nationalists and Federalists see him destined for bigger things too. So what’s his name? Far be it from me to diminish your delight in discovering it for yourself when you see the film, or diminish your suspense in finding out who becomes Governor.
Robert MacDougall
Photo: Apple TV+The young Texans in the program are predominantly conservative. If the film has a bias, it’s skepticism about party politics. The first words on screen are those of George Washington, who, in his 1796 farewell address, warned that political parties were likely “to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” That’s not how the Boys State boys see it, of course. They’re into gleeful game-playing at the outset, as if the Nationalists and Federalists were booze-free fraternities—“Our masculinity will not be infringed,” one kid declares, only partly in jest—and then into unconscious or semiconscious mimicry as they emulate the sort of candidates we all see on TV, ticking off talking points with robotic affect.
Products of a combative culture, most of the boys seem to be breeding true as pols in training. Never mind that one of them proposes, as a platform plank, defense against alien invaders—from outer space, not other nations. That’s part of the fun of being 17, as most of them are, and away from home for a weeklong taste of adult activity. What’s less amusing is the background cynicism and backroom scheming. One particularly charismatic youngster, a football player who could be mistaken for a movie star in training, remarks, pseudo-sagely, “Sometimes you gotta say what you gotta say to win. Sometimes you can’t win on what you believe in your heart.” Another kid says, almost lasciviously, “We’ll introduce shock and awe. It’ll be awesome.”
Rene Otero
Photo: Apple TV+Then there’s the narrowness of their frames of reference. No one expects a high-school junior to be a junior Socrates, but the debates here turn, with ritual rhetoric, only on the usual subjects of immigration, abortion and gun control, as if such matters as education, crumbling infrastructure, the advances and challenges of science, or America’s place in the world had been declared out of bounds. And the rhetoric itself is dismaying, the vocabulary impoverished. Many young Americans, the documentary reminds us, can’t speak very well these days, a point that’s unintentionally emphasized by one of the participants who seems blessed by an orator gene; it’s no surprise when the end titles tell us he went on to win an award for extemporaneous speaking.
If the film sheds a baleful light on how some kids view participatory politics, it brings much better news about the capacity for surprise that can set young political animals apart from the pack. The born orator fancies himself an enabler of other aspirants to high office, yet he’s also a born organizer, ready for the fray. The football player with movie-star quality seems hollow and doctrinaire at first, yet he turns out to be self-reflective, intellectually agile and remarkably generous. And the film’s real star, the one from a poor family, considers himself with genuine modesty “the quiet voice in the storm,” yet he discovers the power of his ideas during the course of the week, and makes himself heard more affectingly than anyone else. These days we take inspiration from politics wherever we manage to find it. “Boys State” is a good place to look.
Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
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