Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

A lot of people really don’t want these guys “humanized” or “normalized” or whatever a documentary like this might do. Frankly, it’s not because understanding them better is dangerous; it’s because the fear-outrage culture pointed at them is self-serving and largely performative

It's a tricky watch. It effectively forces you to wade into the societal and aesthetic miasma that enables young males to loop on self-loathing, sometimes for years Maybe you feel bad for them, maybe you want to shake them, maybe you just wind up uneasy about the whole thing

The filmmaker doesn't hand you a lens, so you basically just watch a few of these guys move through their lives, feeling around for an escape route without much hope they’ll find one and certainly with no expectation that anyone removed from their circumstances will help them

But it’s also a fundamentally hopeful movie, because these guys know that something is wrong and they really do want to figure out how to make it better. They're genuinely trying to save themselves, and that turns out to not be an impossible endeavor

Life is really fucking hard for a lot of folks. This is one kind of life that a lot of young men are living, explained by the people living it. I think you should watch it, because I don't think you're likely to be able to avoid the cultural insistence that you judge these people

If you have Prime, you can watch for free from tomorrow through May 6 https://www.amazon.com/adlp/sxsw