What was it like to first stand up in front of an auditorium full of white and conservative 17-year-olds as a Latinx teen?

Boys State will premiere on Apple TV+ this Friday. I called Garza to understand what it felt like to be left of center and Latinx in a white, conservative space and what the septuagenarians running for president can learn from Gen Z. That makes Boys State the perfect film as we barrel toward the oddest and most consequential election in decades. Instead, it’s more like a telescope pointed directly at a political pundit’s brain. Of course, Texas is America turned up to 11, and Boys State doubly so, which means the documentary isn’t exactly a window into the soul of the nation.

At one point, a candidate is compared favorably to Ben Shapiro. The thousand teenage boys already have strong feelings about abortion, about gun rights, about secession, and about Christian values. It’s a glimpse of a politics of malleability that’s only possible because the constituency is not yet 18. And then there’s Garza, the film’s hero, who is able to convince room after room full of teens raised on Fox News that his politics of inclusion and hope can actually work for them. The film’s best moment comes as MacDougall admits to the directors (and seemingly to himself) that he’s been lying about his position on a key topic all week we are left to imagine why adult politicians similarly abandon their personal morals and the unseen forces pushing them to do so. With straight-to-camera interviews that function like a reality-TV confessional, Boys State lets each of its stars transcend their well-worn political identities.

The directors follow four boys who offer a window into the odd future of Texas politics: Ben Feinstein, who inhabits the Karl Rove/dirty trickster role René Otero, a Black liberal outsider who manages to capture the Nationalist Party chairmanship Robert MacDougall, the handsome boot-wearing West Point–bound front-runner and Steven Garza, the son of a Mexican immigrant and March for Our Lives organizer who runs against him. on steroids - the assembled strivers are almost all conservative and white.Īmanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s Boys State - which won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival - is a ridiculously engrossing vérité look inside the 2018 camp. Over the course of the week, the teens split up into two rival parties, hash out their platforms, then elect representatives. Steven Garza and his peers offer a window into our strange political future: “People don’t realize that Generation Z is more conservative than they think it is.”Įach year, 1,100 teenage boys gather at the University of Texas, Austin, campus for the American Legion’s Texas Boys State.

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