Boys State
A thousand 17-year-old boys from Texas join together to build a representative government from the ground up.
Metadata
| Director | Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine |
| Year | 2020 |
| Writer | Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine |
| Stars | Ben Feinstein, Steven Garza, Robert MacDougall |
The Movie in 3 Sentences
This movie reminded me of the mock-government programs my school used to force us into—something I never really understood the point of at the time. Watching Boys State made me wish someone had explained it better back then, because what starts as a student leadership exercise in Texas quickly turns into a surprisingly sharp miniature of American politics.
At Boys State, hundreds of teenage boys are divided into two fictional parties and asked to build platforms, run campaigns, and elect a governor. In theory, it is a lesson in democracy. In practice, the documentary ends up revealing many of the system’s ugliest incentives: wanting to be on the winning side more than caring about what the party actually stands for, learning that deception can be useful when running for office, discovering that slogans and crowd energy often work better than nuance, and seeing how easily social media, insinuation, and identity can be weaponized against an opponent.
Ben Feinstein is probably the most fascinating example. He is incredibly charismatic, articulate, and obviously intelligent, but as a party chairman he repeatedly chooses the most ruthless political tactics available to him. What makes that frustrating is precisely how talented he is—you can easily imagine those same abilities being used very differently.
Steven Garza, on the other hand, feels almost like the documentary’s counterargument. He tries to listen, understand people he disagrees with, and find pragmatic common ground rather than simply telling the crowd what it wants to hear. Watching him campaign makes it clear how badly politics could use more people like that—and also how difficult it is for that kind of approach to survive in a system that rewards spectacle and certainty. Though, as a side note, choosing Napoleon as your personal hero is certainly an interesting choice given the amount of death and suffering attached to his legacy.
The documentary itself is extremely well made, especially in the candid backstage moments where you see the calculations underneath the speeches. But more than anything, I found it depressing. These are teenagers playing politics for a week, yet many of them seem to discover almost immediately the same tricks, incentives, and compromises that define the real thing.