White Boy Rick
It is not often that I leave the movie theater feeling empty, especially when the movie I’m watching is based on a true story. But as I watched White Boy Rick, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. If you watch the trailer for the film, you would expect a gripping drama filled with emotion and intense action set in the 1980s. What you actually get is an uninspired journey through lower middle-class neighborhoods in Detroit that fails to captivate audiences the way that it should.
One of the most conflicting parts of White Boy Rick is the acting of Richie Merritt in the title role. It never feels lie he completely buys in, he doesn’t convincingly play up any emotions during the film’s almost two hour runtime, and he simply fades into the background when anyone else is on screen (even non actors YG and Danny Brown). The writing for his character does him no favors, as all of the other supporting characters are given more interesting dialogue and Rick just goes along for the ride, offering only the random quip to remind viewers that he’s present. I wanted this film to go inside of Rick’s psyche and show exactly how he was able to build his legend but the movie just fails to give the story the emphasis it deserves.
The film opens and establishes that Rick (Richie Merritt) and his father, Rick Wershe Sr. (Matthew McConaughey), are in the gun business. They attend a gun show and con a seller into giving them most of his inventory at a steal of a price because of Ricky’s age (which is one of two times that I can remember his age, the most distinctive part of this story, being mentioned in the film). When those guns, and some homemade silencers, are sold to local gang leader Johnny Curry (Jonathan Majors), the FBI shows up asking questions. And after some less than helpful answers from Rick Sr., they are able to coerce Rick to sell drugs and grow close to the gang on the condition that they don’t send his father to jail. This sets Rick down a less than righteous path and once the FBI is done using him, he decides to start selling drugs without the FBI’s help. By the third act of the film, Rick is a drug lord in his own right but we never get to see the journey he takes to get there. One superimposed year over a scene later and he’s wearing 5 gold chains and driving a Mercedes.
The film does very little to give the audience insight into rest of the Wershe’s lives. Rick’s sister Dawn (Bel Powley) is a drug addict and his father wants to open a chain of video stores. That’s about all we get. It moves very quickly through the years of Rick’s life and we don’t always get the information needed for the relationships presented in front of us. Less than 20 minutes after, Rick is accosted by Johnny’s crew for showing up to sell the guns, he is best friends with crew member Boo (RJ Cyler) and getting free aqua colored suits from Johnny himself. The film feels gritty and it wants you to know just how dangerous the life of this teenager is but there seems to be a lack of emotion in almost every scene. Most of the big moments in the film feel so weightless that they barely make an impact. And the ending of the film was so anticlimactic that it almost feels unfinished.
There a lot of stories that seem fascinating enough to become films and I believe White Boy Rick is one of the stories that should translate well to the big screen. But great biopics are able to show the audience their subject in their entirety without feeling like they are compromising any details from the story. Director Yann Demange and the three screenwriters seem to do nothing but compromise the details and fail to see that it takes more than guns and drugs to make a movie that people will actually care about. We need character development, yet the character that the camera focuses on is a waste of time (in the film). Ricky is supposedly the main character but he is probably the least intriguing person in the whole movie and his costars pick up a lot of the slack. RJ Cycler is destined to be a star, Bel Powley gave one of the more convincing performances I’ve seen all year, and Brian Tyree Henry is frustratingly underutilized. White Boy Rick is all about the ups and downs of Ricky’s life but it may have been more compelling if it wasn’t.
I give it 2 ½ out of 5 trash cans.
