"White Boy Rick" Review | The Perils of Lacking Focus
White Boy Rick tells an intriguing story in a disappointingly clumsy manner. Despite having admirable aspects to it, White Boy Rick’s lack of focus and an emotional core leaves something to be desired.
Docudramas that focus on the lives on historical figures are the epitome of high risk, high reward films. On one hand, these kinds of films can pinpoint a person’s life in a way that provides insight into a person’s life or a significant event. They can be stories that are faithful to true events while still being entertaining, enjoyable stories in their own right. On the other hand, docudramas can easily bloat themselves with unnecessary details and/or too many sideplots and diversions to create a coherent narrative. We saw this occur recently with Operation Finale, and now we’re seeing it again with White Boy Rick.
Based on true events, White Boy Rick tells the story of Rick Wershe, Jr., the youngest FBI informant in history. Rich helps his father sell firearms to pursue their goal of opening a video store. At the beginning of the film, the father and son are selling firearms at a gun show. After this, Rick comes to learn that local murders and violence have occurred because of Rick Wershe, Sr.’s firearms distribution, which includes not-so-legal weapon attachments. Soon after, Wershe, Jr. is contacted by FBI agents to conduct a drug trade with various men that are suspects in these murders. What follows is a story about Rick’s ascension in the drug world whilst being undercover, and his eventual downfall and the betrayals and tragedies that come alongside it.
Unfortunately, one of White Boy Rick’s most apparent problems becomes noticeable fairly quickly - its awkward momentum. The first act of this film is littered with short scenes that could have been shortened or omitted, only seeming to exist for the sake of representing the realities in this story as faithfully as possible. While there’s some admiration to be found with that sentiment, this unfortunately makes the film’s pacing feel quite cluttered. Perhaps the greatest example with this is with the titular character’s sister, Dawn.
Shortly into the film, it’s established that Dawn is a drug addict that’s in an abusive relationship, and she ends up leaving her family to be with her abusive boyfriend. What makes this sideplot troublesome is its lack of focus. The film treats this sideplot as just that - a sideplot, and doesn’t really give this thread the time it needs in order to leave any kind of impact on the audience. We see Rick and his father express their remorse for seeing Dawn run away, but these moments sadly come across as merely telling versus showing. We’re told how Rick and his father feel about Dawn’s situation, but we’re never given the opportunity to learn and feel the pain that the characters experience.
The most unfortunate aspect about this lack of focus is that it bleeds into the central plot of the film. We have the main plot of Rick’s ascension into the drug world through being an undercover FBI informant, in addition to a lot of sideplots regarding his relationships with his family and friends. Instead of focusing on one or the other, White Boy Rick decides to cover both of these aspects of Rick’s story, which leads to an onfocused mess of plots that feel like they’re competing with one another.
In addition to the sideplot with his sister, there’s another plot thread that has to do with a girl that Rick is acquainted with from school. Not only is this character introduced seemingly out of nowhere, but her relationship with Rick and her overall impact on his life feels relatively unexplored. In fact, a lot of characters featured in this film feel as if we’re only exposed to a surface-level understanding of who they are. Instead of having a smaller cast of characters that we know very well, White Boy Rick instead opts to have a large cast of characters that we don’t get to learn very much about.
So what effect does this have on the film? Simply put, trying to cover so many different plots and characters ultimately causes the film to spread itself too thin. Moreover, we have a film that struggles to find its identity. Is White Boy Rick a film historical docudrama that focuses on Rick’s ascension in the drug world, or is it a docudrama that focuses on how drugs and violence can negatively impact family life? This film can’t decide between the two and chooses to be both, which tragically forces neither angle to be tackled as thoughtfully as they could have been.
This lack of focus as accompanied by a pacing that feels rushed at parts. Rick rises in notoriety in the drug world very quickly, causing the film to feel as if it’s rushing the plot along in order to get more dramatic parts of the story faster. This causes a lot of important events and interactions to feel as if they happen a lot sooner than they should, making the film’s pacing feel a bit unnatural.
Additionally, there are many important characters that get an shockingly small amount of screen time. Dawn’s abusive boyfriend? On screen for less than twenty seconds in the film and doesn’t have a word of dialogue. Rick’s female friend from school? Maybe two minutes in the entire film. Both of these characters leave significant imprints on the story, and yet the screenplay doesn’t treat them as such.
All of this comes to a final act that seems convinced that it’s far more emotional and hard-hitting than it actually is. White Boy Rick’s writing seems to be convinced that telling aspects of the story (such as Rick’s quick ascension into the drug world and betrayals he eventually faces) is as effective as showing us the story. White Boy Rick wants to tell us about how characters are impacted by the plot’s events, without making an effort to make us feel for the characters through their actions. This makes for a third act that, while it certainly attempts to leave an emotional imprint on the audience, greatly misses its intended mark.
While the screenplay struggles to tell this film’s story effectively, the same can’t be said for the actors’ performances in this film. Across the board, this film has solid performances throughout, with Matthew McConaughey being a particular standout.
Oddly enough, White Boy Rick reminded me of another below average docudrama from last year: All Eyez on Me. While the subject matter from the two films vary greatly, I ended up feeling very similar about them. While both of these films discuss interesting people that went experienced very intriguing stories, representing their stories as feature-length films feel like a disservice. Like with All Eyez on Me, I feel that White Boy Rick could have avoided many of its focus and pacing issues if its story was told through a miniseries. So many plot elements in this film feel like they’re competing against each other for screen time, making many aspects of this film feel underdeveloped. I truly feel that the story of White Boy Rick is an interesting one - it’s just a story that I feel should not have been told in a feature-length film.
As a drama, White Boy Rick does the bare minimum. To its credit, the story here is an intriguing one. There are a lot of interesting moral questions here, such as questioning if selling weapons is no better than selling drugs. But unfortunately, this film’s lack of focus and insistence on telling and not showing drag it down to being a below average drama about drugs, weapons, and how people can be affected by them.
Final Grade: D
Thank you for reading! What did you think of White Boy Rick? As always, feel free to join the conversation and let me know what you think!
