Girls State Review: Apple’s Documentary Sequel Celebrates Sisters Doin’ It for Themselves

At the outset of Girls State, it seems as if filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss have deliberately set out to make a direct sequel to their 2020 documentary Boys State. Like any follow-up, they take the same general playbook and add in some wrinkles so the experience doesn’t feel like a rerun. Rather than following a group of rambunctious, ambitious teenage boys for a week in the mock government conference, this one’s for the girls.

Unlike their previous film’s larger-than-life Texan stomping grounds, which practically supplies its own mythology, the value of the setting here is subtler. McBaine and Moss selected a 2022 Girls State conference in Missouri for their project, which is notable primarily for being the state’s first instance of hosting events for both sexes simultaneously on the same campus. Try as they might to keep their documentary a self-sufficient microcosm of political anxieties and a preview of America’s future, this ready-made contrast simply cannot be ignored. To the film’s benefit, the directors let the outside world intrude and jumble the format.

None of these heightened stakes destabilize the film’s center of gravity, the teenage participants whom McBaine and Moss treat with the utmost dignity and decency. The program provides them with ready-made cinematic stakes as it takes the biggest fish from their respective student government ponds and plops them in a think tank together. Girls State offers a coming-of-age compendium with a civic twist as the adolescents fight to advance policies and win elections.

Even among a group of the most idealistic and intellectually minded pupils, politics is still personality. This makes a particularly challenging proposition for these teenage girls, who must project confidence in their sense of self at the very time their minds are the most malleable to change. Over a week, their identities absorb the blows from confronting a wider universe where their peers view success as a zero-sum game. The American Legion sponsors tout a program like Girls State as a culminating event of their young lives, though McBaine and Moss wisely recognize the real journeys are only just beginning in front of their camera.

For some subjects, the big “lesson” is a bit more straightforward. The sweet but shy Nisha learns that intelligence alone only takes her so far as her path diverges from her outgoing friend and foil Brooke. Tochi, a Black participant and coalition builder, feels as if she’s unlocked a superpower by learning how to confidently communicate with white girls who might never have talked to someone like her. While these focal points might lack the overpowering charisma of the subjects profiled in Boys State, they’re instructive examples all the same.

But the filmmakers place a figure, Emily Worthmore, at the emotional center of Girls State who follows anything but a pre-packaged story. The documentary’s introductory biographical clip package of her background establishes Emily as a formidable threat for the program’s highest office of governor as she runs through all her accomplishments in suburban St. Louis. And then the filmmakers pause for just a moment as if they know a liberally minded audience will be anticipating a shoe to drop before revealing that she’s conservative.

Unlike they did with the hero of Boys State, the straightforwardly progressive pragmatist Steven Garza, McBaine and Moss challenge their viewers to connect with a protagonist who possesses a different political ideology and identity. Emily isn’t reducible to a conservative caricature because the documentary never wavers in demonstrating her sincerity in the values she professes. Yet at a time when gender has become a dominant sorting mechanism for political preference, she’s increasingly an anomaly. Many of her experiences aren’t limited to a single side of the ideological spectrum, such as the tentativeness she feels trying to make herself palatable to people she fears might not accept the real her.

Girls State gently points out that Emily doesn’t yet know that she’s more open to change than she realizes. Conservatism serves as a guiding light for Emily, not an anchor to a fixed position. Her agitation begins with a nagging sense that the concept of the “sisterhood” propagated by the program holds the participants back from having the serious discussions she craves. She views solidarity built around female marginalization in politics as outliving its usefulness, holding them down instead of lifting them up. McBaine and Moss latch onto her discontent with a flattened discourse, nimbly expanding their purview with their primary subject.

Emily begins to fixate on the blatant disparities between Girls State and Boys State playing out in front of their eyes. Despite abortion being a more pressing and personal matter for the girls, it’s the other sex who gets to debate the issue with real politicians as the leaked Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision weighs heavily over the proceedings. Though Emily lacks the natural campaigning skills that she entered the program confidently extolling, she discovers a different drive when her run for office falters. A knack for investigative journalism emerges as she seeks answers to why the programs are separate and unequal.

McBaine and Moss’s film doesn’t knight Emily as a newly converted crusader for justice. Due to her desire to win a college scholarship from Girls State, she also must weigh just how aggressively she’s willing to interrogate institutions and structures that could ultimately deliver her material benefit. That tension between an unsettled status quo and an unclear alternative comes to define Girls State. The documentary cannot map to simple narratives of triumphalism and tribalism like Boys State, so it’s all the better a portrayal of the titular program by breaking with the formula and baking uncertainty into the fabric of the film.

The film’s storytelling structure befits the female experience in American politics, for chafing against existing systems designed by and for men. Unsurprisingly, a glimpse into a summer civics camp doesn’t provide easy answers for the participants, and by extension the audience, as to what could ameliorate systemic gender inequality. But if there’s hope somewhere in Girls State, it’s in showing young women like Emily are starting to ask the necessary questions.