White Boy Rick Is Frequently Scattered But Also Frequently Engaging

For better and for worse, there's a whole lot that the crime drama White Boy Rick wants to explore in depicting the life of non-fictional individual Richard Wershe Jr. A.K.A. White Boy Rick (played by newcomer Richie Merritt), a 15-year-old from Detroit, Michigan who was hired by the FBI and the local law enforcement to become a supplier for local drug dealers as a way of gaining information needed to bring these people into justice. Despite being a teenager, Wershe is basically just dragged into being an informant under the threat of his father of the same name (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), who sells guns, if he doesn't cooperate. Wershe is basically trapped between a rock and a hard place and he decides to get out of it by agreeing to serve as an FBI informant.

That's a pretty fascinating story just on a conceptually level alone, one that offers an opportunity to, like last year's American Made, explore the messed up ways the American government tried (and failed) to combat the spreading of drugs in the United States by illicit means. In addition to that compelling concept, White Boy Rick is also a tale about people going from being idealistic to be disillusioned (personified by Rick's dad starting out the movie espousing how America is the land of opportunity and ending the movie in a state of shock over realizing how badly the American law enforcement officers have treated his son), a troubled father/son tale, an exploration of how Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) copes with addiction and also how Rick finds a surrogate family with the gangs he hangs around with.

That's a lot to cram into one 111-minute long movie and it's no surprise, though no less disappointing, that White Boy Rick merely skims the surface of many of these storylines rather than exploring them in an in-depth manner. The trio of law enforcement officers that coerce Rick into being an informant, despite being played by the likes of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Brian Tyree Henry, don't have all that much in the way of personality to speak of and mostly show up as a way to move the plot forward rather than as actual people in the life of its titular protagonist. More damaging, the various criminals that Rick mingles with are similarly undercooked, aside from one scene of Rick hanging out with them and shooting some rats, we don't get a chance to see him bonding with these guys who the film keeps suggesting have become the family he never had.

It ends up feeling like White Boy Rick needs an extended cut to allow another twenty or so minutes of screentime to give these ideas and characters more room to breathe because some very intriguing ideas get lost in the shuffle of trying to cover so many different parts of Rick's life. Perhaps such an imaginary longer cut (#ReleaseTheExtendedWhiteBoyRickCut) would also lend some more personality to the lead character of the piece, who, as depicted here, constantly feels so very close to being a richly developed character but just misses the bar. Rick is intentionally a passive player in many of the horrible adult-inflicted situations he finds himself, but I still wish we could get more insight into his perspective throughout the story, he too often feels like a spectator rather than a full-on participant in a story that's all about him.

Obviously, there's plenty in White Boy Rick that doesn't work, but that doesn't mean there isn't stuff to praise here, on the contrary, White Boy Rick does enough right that it makes me wish its weaker aspects weren't so underwhelming. For one thing, Yamm Demange has a great eye for visuals as a director, I especially love how he uses sources of sparse lighting in nighttime sequences (namely a scene of the two Rick's trying to save Dawn from a drug den) that sell a sense of hopelessness. I also love how Demange constantly makes sure that the film, even when it's depicting the young Rick engaging in a party lifestyle, evokes a melancholy aura. White Boy Rick is about many things, but above all else, it's a tale about people engaging in cycles of self-destruction and that means even moments of joy can only ever lead to misery, an inevitability that Demange dangles throughout the movie in impressive ways.

Demange also is a good actor's director as he gets good performances out of everyone from young newcomers to industry legends to those (like RJ Cyler) underserved by the sometimes scattered script. Richie Merritt, playing the titular lead, sometimes gets underserved by the script, but for the most part he's quite good in this and I'm especially impressed with how well he conveys Rick being someone who's been pushed out of adolescence too early just so he can survive. A scene where this teenager wistfully reminiscences to his sister (played well by the woefully underrated Bel Powley) about how "they had a nice childhood" like he's 60 has a weary quality to it that's utterly haunting to see emerge out of someone so young. Playing the characters father is McConaughey who finally returns to the more complex supporting dramatic roles that launched his comeback earlier this decade in the first place.

McConaughey fully embraces the grimy nature of this role and while he hits the beats you'd expect him to from a typical 2018 Matthew McConaughey performance, he also shows real skill in handling the nuances of the fractured relationship his character has with his son (they're not really best buds or enemies, they're kind of in between) as well as scenes requiring him to eschew dialogue in favor of more subtle actions (specifically one depicting his character debating whether or not to get violent revenge for his son). Merritt and McConaughey and the rest of the cast work nicely with the complex ideas that White Boy Rick grapples with and they're ideas that I wish the script could confront in a more insightful manner. Thankfully, the script throws just enough darts that land on the dartboard and when combined with the more consistently successful directing, acting and overall atmosphere, White Boy Rick (namely the directing, the acting and the overall atmosphere) ends up as a solid crime drama, but I still found myself wishing it had fulfilled more of its potential.