Butler's Cinema Scene

Matthew McCaughnahey, Richie Merritt

“WHITE BOY RICK” My rating: C+ 

110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s easy to see why the real-life tale depicted in “White Boy Rick” got Hollywood’s attention. Here’s the story of a 15-year-old white Detroit kid who back in the ’80s infiltrated a black drug ring for the FBI, survived an assassination attempt, became a cocaine kingpin and ended up serving a long prison sentence.

It practically screams “Movie!”

Yet “White Boy Rick” is a surprisingly limp affair, perhaps because the screenwriters (Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller) and director Yann Demange cannot decide what to make of their offbeat protagonist.

And if they don’t know, those of us in the audience are even more in the dark.

The basics are these: Back in ’84 Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) was helping his bottom-feeding, gun-dealing dad (Matthew McConaughey, in full character actor mode with pot belly and greasy mullet) peddle illegal homemade silencers to Detroit’s gangbangers.

Cornered by a couple of manipulative  and openly amoral FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane), Rick agrees to go undercover if the feds will leave his old man alone. He starts by buying at local drug houses, ostensibly on behalf of his crackhead sister (Bel Powley), and gradually becomes accepted by the crew of a local drug lord (Jonathan Majors).

Before long he’s dropped out of school and is sporting expensive track suits and gold bling (he’s so thick he buys a gaudy Star of David necklace, not realizing it represents Judaism) and doing all sorts of services both for the gang and for his FBI handlers.

His father, meantime, does’t know of his son’s double life…although when he finds a shoebox filled with nearly $10,000 he starts to get the picture. Richard Sr. wants nothing to do with drugs, but by this time Rick is up to his neck in the life.

Eventually it all unwinds.

So what are we to make of Rick Wershe?  Hard to say. Newcomer Merritt certainly looks the part of the unread, instinct-driven Rick, what with his kinky Beatle-cut and a half-assed mustache that looks like a fudgesicle smear. You can see why the crooks saw him as a harmless mascot.

But personality-wise he’s a human marshmallow, all puffiness with few sharp edges to grab our interest.  Perhaps Rick is some sort of natural savant when it comes to the drug world; or maybe he’s just at the mercy of luck, be it good or bad. On one level he seems a clueless innocent; yet he eagerly commits major crimes.

The film’s indecisiveness extends to its emotional pallette. Things happen to our young hero that should outrage and sadden us…yet they don’t. And the film veers from gritty street-level realism to a cocky 10-year-old (Devito Parker Jr.) who talks like a 50-year-old convict: his hilarity is refreshing but utterly at odds with the rest of the movie.

McConaughey is fine as Rick’s old man, while Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie are pretty much wasted as his grandparents. Powley  gives us one of the more irritating dope fiends of recent years. The ever-impressive Eddie Marsan offers some diversion as a wildly eccentric drug wholesaler, but it feels as if most of his performance was left on the cutting room floor.

| Robert W.Butler