Movie Review - White Boy Rick

The reason this film was made is because it's a true-story with an interesting hook. The titular character is reportedly the youngest, federal informant ever who then went on to become the longest-serving, nonviolent prisoner in the United States. Ricky Wershe, Jr. was 14 when the FBI recruited him to help take down a drug operation that had connections to the mayor of Detroit. Supposedly, Wershe, Jr. was going to be protected. Yet, Wershe, Jr. ended up being convicted at age 17 to life in prison for drug dealing. He was eventually released but only after 30 years. This film, directed by Yann Demange, depicts those three years of Wershe's life that resulted in his incarceration.

Richie Merritt stars as Ricky, the 14-year-old in question. He seems like an Eminem-type but 20 years before Eminem would become a household name. He's a white teen in a predominantly black environment who is mostly stoic. He doesn't speak much but what he does say is usually tough and to-the-point. He has a macho, street swagger and like the black kids around him wants to emulate gangsters such as Scarface.

Matthew McConaughey (Interstellar and Dallas Buyers Club) also stars as Richard, the father to Ricky. He's also father to Ricky's older sister. Richard is a single father whose wife and mother to his children left him to raise the kids alone. He does so by selling guns for which he's licensed. He doesn't have a store though. He instead sells his firearms out the trunk of his car. He dreams of having a store, but not a gun store. He wants instead a video or movie store.

Bel Powley (Detour and The Diary of a Teenage Girl) co-stars as Dawn, the aforementioned sister. She doesn't have the best relationship with her father, not like Ricky who is the closest to the old man. She acts out by running away with one of the neighborhood drug dealers and becoming a drug addict in some crack den nearby. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller never reconcile why she was acting out or what was at the root of her tense relationship with her father.

Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight and Single White Female) also co-stars as Alex Snyder, the FBI agent who recruits Ricky to infiltrate a local drug dealer's inner circle. She's pretty cold about everything that happens, if not more stoic than Ricky, almost detached. She is perhaps meant to be emblematic of the problem of the federal government and its overall war on drugs, the issues regarding the criminal justice system and over incarceration.

As documentaries like Ava DuVernay's 13th have indicated, the over incarceration and the unfairness in the criminal justice system are due to racial issues and discrimination on the basis of skin color. At one point, Jonathan Majors (Hostiles and When We Rise) who plays Johnny Curry, the major, drug dealer in question, points out the fact that because he's black, he's going to get more jail time than Ricky. I suppose it's meant to be ironic when the reverse comes true because in reality Curry served less years than Wershe, less than half of Wershe's sentence actually.

Arguably, Ricky's extraordinarily long prison sentence is something at which we're meant to be shocked. It's supposed to be unfair, but why? It's not like he didn't do what he was convicted of doing. One reason might be because he's so young. Due to Merritt seeming like he's in his 20's, his youth and innocence never really come through his presence or performance. There are references to him skipping school, but given how he is, his age never feels like an issue.

The real reason the movie wants us to feel sad for Ricky by film's end is because it wants us to believe that Ricky was a victim of the government and its agencies like the FBI and the CIA, which have done shady things, and this movie does suggest that the FBI recruiting this teenager and even the way it went about it were certainly shady, but even the movie admits that ultimately it's Ricky's choice and his father's failing to stop him that more led to Ricky's downfall than anything else.

A case could have been made that the FBI created the very criminal that they then needed to stop. Yet, that case is lost in the narrative of a father losing control of his children, which is the less interesting narrative here, if still the more emotionally compelling. Last year, around this same time, American Made (2017), starring Tom Cruise, was released and American Made made the case of the so-called cops creating a criminal better than this one.

Rated R for language, drug content, violence, some sexual references and brief nudity.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 51 mins.