The Kings of Summer (2013)

The Kings of Summer arrived from Sundance in 2013 with the usual festival plumage: an indie soundtrack, a first-time director, and a handful of teenagers fleeing their parents for a clearing in the Ohio woods. It concerns Joe, Patrick, and a stray named Biaggio, who build a house out of scrap lumber and declare themselves sovereign. The rebellion is aimed squarely at fathers, mothers, and the general indignity of being sixteen. Nobody in the film pauses to address the audience about the structure of power. The camera simply watches boys hammer nails badly.

The cast is white throughout, with Moisés Arias drifting past as a curiosity instead of a statement. The women exist to be crushes or mothers, and the film shows no interest in correcting this arrangement. Biaggio's oddness is played for laughs, never diagnosed. The boys do not escape capitalism, only curfews, and their woodland idyll is a fantasy of independence, not an environmental parable. A snake, a rabbit, and a machete carry the third act. The moral, such as it is, involves going home.

We are left with a film that has no argument to make about the culture that produced it. It wants to be about friendship and the summer before everything changes, and it achieves that modest aim without incident. There is no sermon, no corrective casting, no lecture smuggled into the campfire scenes. For a viewer trained to audit such things, the silence is nearly restful. The tally comes back empty, and the emptiness is earned.