Saw this movie this time last week and sat on writing a review, because I thought absence would make my heart grow fonder, but upon reflection I don’t have much to say. White Boy Rick is not offensive enough to warrant hatred. The story is trapped by the same limitations of the “this is a thing that happened” narrative that most biopics feature. Instead of a conclusion, we the audience watch the conversation from the trailer between Rick and his dad, which is either a brave decision or a completely stupid, uninspired turn. Then the picture fades to black and we read, like we always do, the card that tells us how everything worked out after thirty years of quiet contemplation is erased in a paragraph, with no discussion of systemic change in the police department that brought on the incarceration in the first place. The screenwriters couldn’t find a way to make police corruption interesting, so they opted to focus on the finer parts of Rick’s life: shooting up rats under the highway, an unimportant trip to Las Vegas that doesn’t really advance the plot but makes you wonder why more people were worried about selling handguns to a minor at the gunshow than there were bartenders worried about serving alcohol to a sixteen year old, and, oh yeah, he has underage sex with a much older woman at one point, which is when you’re sort of wondering who chose which pitches for male wish-fulfillment made it into the film. Not because a film can’t have instances of intimacy between people of vastly different ages and be fun, but because not every film about growing up as a teenager need to feature tired conquest narratives in order to capture our imagination. Just because the film acknowledges the laziness with which it has organized its point-of-view, yet again, around a sympathetic white boy-turned-man, because audiences can’t be trusted to empathize with other kinds of faces doesn’t mean that it’s exonerated itself from critique. The warning Rick receives about the difference between “white time” and “black time” if someone should charge him with a crime doesn’t change the fact that we spend an awful lot of uncritical time watching black thugs beat on other black thugs and Rick and his gunrunning dad remain mostly squeaky clean. There are probably better movies about Detroit to go see. If you’re really jonesing, my favorite is Only Lovers Left Alive.
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