Girls State review – compelling follow-up to hit documentary

In 2018, film-makers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine struck gold – or, rather, tuned into it – when they attended a weeklong Texas program in which 1,000 teenage boys elect and run a mock state government. Their subsequent film, Boys State, bottled the potential and peril of the future – the idealism and ambition of youth, the capacity to change one’s mind, the allure of power, the corrosive codes of masculinity – into two hours at once terrifying and hopeful, winning the 2020 Sundance documentary grand jury prize.

Related: Sundance 2024: the biggest films to look out for from this year’s festival

Now the duo returns to the festival with Girls State, a similarly structured look at a Boys State sister program in Missouri. Though the mock government programs, run by the American Legion, remain (controversially, to some) separated by sex in the state, the film captures the first time in its 80-year history that the two coexist on the same campus, at the same time, in the summer of 2022. For the boys, it’s business as usual, relayed in occasional snippets familiar from the first project – exercises on a football field, delegate meetings, rituals blessed by real-life politicians.

The girls have a looser, less formal program, at least judging by the film’s ambling first half, despite higher stakes; the participants gather weeks after the leaked Dobbs draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade. Their rights as decided by committee are very much top of mind, something everyone – a Catholic sticking to “pro-life”, a conservative who wouldn’t push it on others, a pro-choicer schooled in the talking points of “abortion is healthcare” all at the same cafeteria table and trying to be friendly – seems to agree on.

As in the first film, Moss and McBaine embed with several participants across the political spectrum, with various pains and ambitions, to fascinating effect. There’s Emily, an almost scarily real-life Tracy Flick, blond and determined and brittle, a conservative pastor’s daughter who announces her plan to run for president in 2040; she is one of several to run for governor, the week’s highest office and most competitive position. She warily eyes Faith, her blond rival in doggedness, a young woman even less patient with societal expectations for female docility. (The program, perhaps unsurprisingly, skews white and blond; more than once, it resembles sorority rush.) Some, like Brooke, Maddie and Nisha, are less sure; part of the film’s magnetic, if cliched, sweetness is in watching each grow their confidence over one intense, clarifying week.

There’s tartness, too – Tochi, one of the few Black participants, responds to questions from white girls who have no idea how to talk about her Nigerian heritage with clipped, firm politeness. “I’m having fun,” says Cecilia, a proto-liberal activist, through gritted teeth as she debates Emily on gun control. All of the girls grow dismayed with the structure of the Girls State program, which Moss and McBaine keep somewhat frustratingly opaque, at least in the first half. Some of the rules are clear – girls must always go outside with a buddy for safety, girls must stay covered up (the boys have no such strictures, of course) – but there’s no delineation of days nor context for what, exactly, the girls are doing as they walk around in groups or mill about in the cafeteria. The girls eventually seem frustrated by this, too – too much emphasis on cheery female empowerment and modesty, not enough on actual issues or, say, inequalities between the programs. As one puts it: “I’m a little sick of the fluff.”

Good thing the latter half of the film gets down to business: a mock supreme court case on Missouri’s law requiring any woman seeking an abortion to get counseling, and then the governor’s election, both rendered with the seriousness palpable in the room. As with Boys State, the directors smartly take a back seat, catching the pieces as they fall. The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state. The apparent aimlessness of the week’s first half coalesces into a point: these are not the same programs.

And though they share similar sensibilities, these are not the same films. Necessarily so, as the dynamics of womanhood in politics – of getting people to believe you, of leadership, of conviction – are more steep and delicate than for the boys, interesting in a different way. If Girls State ties a neater bow on the individual mock government experience than its predecessor, it’s with the gut-punch postscript that mere days after their session wrapped, the decision to overturn Roe v Wade became official. The votes in Girls State may have been symbolic, the words occasionally petty, the politicking fraught and sometimes annoying, but stakes are – and rightfully feel – very real.

• Girls State is screening at the Sundance film festival with a release to follow this year on Apple TV+