Mark Reviews Movies: WHITE BOY RICK

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 14, 2018

By the time he was 17, Rick Wesrhe Jr. had been involved in the illegal firearm trade with his father, had bought and sold drugs with the encouragement of local narcotics officers and the FBI, and had transformed himself into a major criminal player on the east side of Detroit. White Boy Rick doesn't see this as glamorous in any way. All of it—the guns, the drugs, the turning federal informant, the rise to some power and influence—is a long, desperate act of need. Wershe did what he had to do, because his father told him it would help the family, the feds told him it would protect his father from prosecution, and he soon believed everything he had been told—by people whom he believed would know better.

So many stories about crime show us the allure of illegal activity, before the reality of the cops, the lawyers, the judges, and the prison time comes crashing down on the temporary benefits. Within this movie's screenplay (written by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller, and Noah Miller), there's little that's appealing about what Rick (Richie Merritt) has to do, and there is even less that's appealing in what he gains from his actions.

The kid was born into poverty, and no matter how many guns or how much crack he sells on the street, Rick still lives in a house with his father, across the street from his paternal grandparents. Three generations haven't been able to scrape by enough of a living to leave this block, where they likely have lived their entire lives. At this rate, all of them will die without getting away from that same block.

The movie is all about chasing the old American Dream by hook or, mostly, by crook. It's 1984, and Richard (Matthew McConaughey), Rick's father, wants to open a video store that will expand into a chain. Starting a business costs money, and the only thing that Rick is competent at is buying firearms on the cheap, altering them or manufacturing accessories, and selling the guns at a much higher price.

Rick wants to help, because he has spent a good chunk of his life learning about guns and the art of convincing others to make a profit. His older sister Dawn (Bel Powley) isn't bringing in any money for the family. Quite the contrary, she's spending a lot to maintain her drug addiction.

The son soon finds himself in the good graces of a local crime kingpin named Johnny (Jonathan Majors), who gives Rick his nickname, has some cops on his payroll, and is about to marry the niece of Detroit's mayor. Crime can pay, apparently, if one is willing to pay off or earn the respect of the right people.

It never does for Rick and his father, though. Instead, a pair of FBI agents (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) appeal to Richard's anger about the drug trade to try to get him to inform on Johnny and his gang. When that doesn't work, they switch their sights to Rick, who's 15 at the time and worried that his dad might face jail time for selling weapons that have been involved in crimes. The agents and a local detective (played by Brian Tyree Henry) gradually draw him in, eventually giving him some cocaine to turn to crack and allowing him to keep the profits of his sales. What poor, teenage boy, already involved in crime and hoping to help his old man, could possibly refuse such an offer?

The movie, directed by Yann Demange, is surprisingly indifferent about what the feds do to Rick, until the story's climactic moments, when all of that work a couple of years prior amounts to a lot nothing for the kid. The story is mostly about establishing the complexities of Rick's involvement in and, later, overseeing of a criminal enterprise that keeps moving, even when the major players are killed or sent to prison. It's also about the teenager's relationship with his father, a guy who seems to fail at everything and whose moral code is strangely tuned (Richard sees no problems with selling guns, even to people whom he knows will use them for murder, but he draws the line at drugs).

Demange establishes a certain distance from the plot, which becomes convoluted in terms of the specifics of Rick's criminal actions, and these characters. It's not because of a lack of sympathy for these people. Indeed, the movie treats their situation as a series of necessary acts, performed with decent motives. It's almost, though, as if Demange wants to communicate just how apathetic the machinery of crime (as well as the law, in the third act) is toward those who are involved in it. Their lives play out, often with mistakes and, in one startling moment, with violence, but every step forward inevitably leads to another step back. At a certain point, they hit a wall.

We can understand the perspective on an intellectual level, but despite fine performances from a naturalistic Merritt (his first acting role) and a world-weary McConaughey, the movie never quite allows us an opportunity to genuinely feel the weight of desperation and circumstantial imprisonment for these characters. They're stuck, but White Boy Rick would rather observe from a safe distance than get stuck in the muck with them.

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