White Boy Rick (2018)

White Boy Rick arrives with the grim confidence of a film that knows exactly which true crime it has chosen. Yann Demange sets his camera in mid-1980s Detroit, a city being hollowed out by the crack trade and the federal response to it, and follows a fourteen-year-old who becomes the youngest informant the Bureau ever recruited. Matthew McConaughey plays the father with a weary, gun-selling charm. The supporting cast is notably integrated, with Brian Tyree Henry, RJ Cyler, Jonathan Majors and Taylour Paige doing serious work in the margins. The story they orbit belongs to a white teenager, and the film never pretends otherwise.

The picture is largely indifferent to the cultural preoccupations of its own release year. There is no romance outside heterosexual convention, no interest in the body as a site of affirmation, no environmental conscience, no anti-capitalist reading of the drug economy it depicts. Poverty and illegal commerce are rendered as weather, not as argument. The women in the cast, Dawn and Cathy among them, are given wounds and appetites but no thesis. Race sits in the frame constantly, since the war on drugs was waged unevenly, but the screenplay declines to name the disparity it keeps brushing against. The result is a crime drama that observes its own inequities without ever raising its voice about them.

What remains is the closing title card. Ricky Wershe served more than thirty years for a non-violent offense, a fact the film presents with a straight face and a mild nudge toward the injustice of it. That gesture is the film's only sermon, and it is brief. Everything before it is a well-acted, modestly assembled tragedy of a kid who was used by everyone who claimed to protect him. The film trusts the story to make its own case. For the most part, it does.