#‘Girls State’ Review: A Worthy, if Not Wholly Satisfying, Companion Doc to ‘Boys State’

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a winner at Sundance in 2020 and the Emmys in 2021, walked a delicate line between delivering an inspiring and wholly disheartening look at the civic-minded teens attending Texas’ version of the annual governmental jamboree. 

Since that ideological conflict aligned perfectly with my own experiences at Massachusetts Boys State a million years ago, I felt Boys State pretty deeply, while recognizing that it raced through its character portraits with more haste than its heroes (and juvenile villains) might have deserved.

The haste is even more evident in Moss and McBaine’s wholly logical follow-up, Girls State, which brings an identical formula to a patriotic ritual that’s exactly like Boys State — except for all of the ways it proves to be different over 94 minutes. 

Girls State, like its predecessor, benefits from strong casting and ample access to the pint-sized political proceedings. And, like its predecessor, it’s likely to leave viewers with a mixture of hope and desperation, though this time Moss and McBaine are less successful spreading their interest across the full cast of participants. Especially in its last third, Girls State becomes something of a one-woman show — and although this focal protagonist has an interesting arc, more potent and poignant points gets a little lost.

For those who missed Boys State, a quick refresher: Every spring, outstanding high school students (and, once, me) descend on a college campus in each of the 50 states, separated by gender, for a week-long celebration of the policy-making process as idealized by the sponsors at the American Legion. Participants are divided by imaginary political party and asked to engage in mock elections, court cases and more. Real-world and fictionalized ideologies blur as everybody experiences what would happen if, indeed, children were the future. 

With Boys State, the filmmakers were able to look at teens in a traditionally red state to get a glimpse at how a younger and more diverse electorate might change Texas moving forward.

With Girls State, the action shifts to Missouri, which has many similar demographic attributes. It’s a state that votes red in most statewide races, but gets bluer and bluer as you go into its cities and its younger demos.

The directors have participants on both sides of the spectrum. Proudly conservative Emily plans to run for the coveted post of governor at Girls State, ahead of her intended run for the presidency in 2040. Nisha, passionately progressive, yearns to push past her social discomfort to become a justice on the Supreme Court. Tochi, who worries about how many of the girls from small towns will never have encountered anybody Black before, has an interest in criminal justice. Rivals for Emily’s gubernatorial run and Nisha’s SCOTUS campaign emerge as likable foils, if not full-fledged characters.

If Boys State was a real ensemble, in which four or five of the guys emerged as complicated, likable and likably infuriating “characters,” Girls State pretty quickly becomes a star vehicle for Emily, who is something of an idealized conservative — unbending in her faith-based values but eager to engage in non-judgmental conversations with anybody.

That she dominates screen time and doesn’t hesitate to espouse her thoroughly inflexible opposition on pivotal issues like abortion and gun control gives the documentary cover to appear balanced while still being more overtly political than Boys State was. In a gloomy piece of serendipity, the girls are arriving at the Lindenwood University campus just as the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade has been leaked to the media. The Girls State participants collectively have a dual frustration at this real-world shadow over their lives and a program they begin to realize is less rigorous and more driven by rah-rah platitudes than the Boys State program that is, for the first time, taking place on the same campus at the same time. 

It’s an inequality that briefly turns Emily into a feminist crusader (not that she would call herself that), letting the filmmakers gently approach this problem in a way they presumably view as more even-handed than if one of the liberal girls tore into the program’s conflicted messaging, dress code and attitude. In other words, if it bothers even Emily, it must be real. But while she’s a good point-of-entry figure, her journey supersedes the overall story and the stories of her peers.

If Boys State really felt like the directors wanted to avoid putting their fingers on the scale, Girls State feels like they know they can’t remain impartial but still don’t want to alienate anybody. In some ways, the new film captures the actual ambivalence within the Boys and Girls State programs at large; the American Legion’s overall mission leans right, while the younger participants, even in red states, will statistically lean left. But “ambivalence” doesn’t match the crowd-pleasing tone that Moss and McBaine, as well as composer T. Griffin and editor Amy Foote, are trying to maintain.

That amiability is still pervasive in Girls State, and should allow the documentary’s Apple TV+ run to easily hold onto and satisfy the Boys State audience. It just isn’t quite as convincing or satisfying.