Boys State is a little like the model UN, without the wussy liberal nonsense of pretending to be foreigners. There are separate groups for girls and boys. Some of America’s biggest political legends took part in their youth, and the film shows the famous photo of a teenaged Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK at his event. But it’s avowedly there to inculcate citizenship and leadership among America’s youth and reintroduce the values of reasoned argument to a generation addled by the social-media screaming match. It is the story of Boys State, a kind of annual debate club in the US for 16 and 17-year-olds organised by the American Legion, state by state, a project invented in 1937 – and there is, to put it delicately, a bit of a 1930s vibe about it. We watch, in what feels like real time, as a group of ambitious teenage boys – smart, poignantly naive, utterly insufferable – get brutally acquainted with Kipling’s two “impostors”: triumph and disaster. But Boys State is as exciting and moving as Steve James’s high school basketball epic Hoop Dreams was a generation ago, with its emotional rawness, its guileless patriotism and capacity for hurt and wonder. ![]() It’s not clear if it’s funny or tragic, if it’s reality TV or reality itself. It’s not clear to me if this is a heartwarming study in young people’s idealism or a Lord of the Flies bloodbath with smug feral demons in white T-shirts.
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