Bingeworthy: ‘Boys State’ showcases the best and worst in American politics – Madison.com

“Boys State,” which won the jury prize for documentary film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was originally slated for theatrical release by A24 Films, premiered Friday on Apple TV+.

Boys State is a summer camp civics program put on by the American Legion in which high school students participate in a weeklong summer campaign season. The students (all male, although there is a Girls State too) are separated into two parties, the Federalists and the Nationalists, who select leaders to run against each other in a mock election. Bill Clinton once took part in Boys State, as did Dick Cheney.

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Filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine spent a week in 2018 embedded in Texas’ Boys State, following the long chaotic process from start to finish. One thing that’s immediately apparent is how predominantly white and conservative the group of over 1,000 students is; Texas Boys State made headlines the previous year when that year’s students voted to secede from the United States.

Opportunist students quickly discover that the easiest path to victory is to play to those right-wing leanings; one candidate, a handsome kid named Robert McDougal, pushes a hardline pro-life platform in his campaign, then tells the interviewers that he’s secretly pro-choice. “Getting here certainly gave me a new appreciation for why politicians lie to get into office,” McDougal says.

But McDougal’s political manipulations are clumsy and obvious, and he doesn’t get very far. Not so Ben Feinstein, a Reagan fan who becomes the de factor campaign manager for the Federalist candidate, urging him to use dirty tricks and trumped-up distractions to undermine his Nationalist opponent. “You have to use personal attacks and you have to find divisive issues in order to differentiate yourself at all,” Feinstein said.

His tactics are dispiritingly familiar to anyone who follows politics, and sees the drive to “win the day” rather than devise a campaign that speaks to voters’ needs. The Nationalist candidate, however, is a liberal-minded young man named Steven Garza, who attempts to run a more inclusive grassroots campaign.

“Boys State” boils down to a battle between Feinstein’s way of politics and Garza’s — not conservative vs. liberal, per se, but divisive vs. empowering. Feinstein’s strategies, which included a phony corruption scandal and mocking Instagram memes, are undeniably effective. But Garza starts winning over even some conservative students with his style of campaigning; even though they might disagree with him on certain issues, he represents the kind of positive movement that they’d like to be part of.

I won’t spoil which side prevails, except that “Boys State” somehow makes the viewer feel both hopeful and despairing about the American political process at the same time. The chicken-and-the-egg question that the documentary poses is whether the boys are just emulating the scorched-earth politics they see on CNN and Fox News, or whether the scorched-earth politics on CNN and Fox News is just an extension of teenage testosterone-fueled roughhousing.

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Also on streaming: With “Big Brother” and “The Bachelor” on hold because of COVID-19, that leaves our friends across the pond to provide cheesy reality TV programming. The British show “Singletown” premieres Thursday on HBO MAX, following five couples who break up for the summer to enjoy the single life living next door to each other in swanky London apartments.

Sundance Now premieres the Canadian true crime documentary miniseries “The Suspect” Tuesday. When Richard Oland, whose family owned Moosehead Brewing, was bludgeoned to death, his son seemed like the obvious suspect. But the four-part series, which got intimate access to the entire Oland family, shows the truth is far messier.

Sad news that Netflix has canceled “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” which mixed information and entertainment in energetic and necessary ways. There are so many political talk shows out here, and yet “Patriot Act” is irreplaceable.