The New York City of White Girl, a ferocious debut from writer-director Elizabeth Wood, is a rapidly gentrifying sprawl where dangers lurk on every street corner and in every corner office. Not that its titular white girl, college sophomore Leah (Morgan Saylor), is woke enough to be wary of anything—not the addictive spiral of her budding coke habit, nor the predatory men who see her as a nubile plaything to be used and abused, nor the string of Very Bad Decisions she’s about to make during a summer that starts off so promisingly for a young woman just getting her first taste of freedom.
Karma is a twisted bitch in White Girl, whose protagonist’s willful destructiveness has maddeningly enormous ramifications for herself and plenty of others. It’s a bold and brash cautionary tale filled with brazen sex, even more brazen sexual assault, mountains of cocaine, a few graphic dick shots, and a lifetime’s worth of terrible decisions unfolding in one party girl’s unrated fever dream. But it’s not karma, really, that Wood is after, but illuminating the gravity of consequences realized for the first time: the skewed power structures that screw over some people but not others, and the dangers of white, mostly male entitlement that ripple invisibly across race, class, and gender lines in the increasingly colliding worlds we navigate.
Getting to those greater revelations is a ride not for the faint of heart. Drawing on her own mishaps as a Midwestern teen turned NYC party monster, Wood ambles into this fateful summer in the city with camerawork by DP Michael Simmonds that, much like Leah, flits about and flirts with everything in its path with an appropriately ADD-addled energy. Beneath a messy cascade of white-blonde mermaid tresses, Leah makes her grand introduction like a sunlit jailbait fantasy, unabashedly flaunting sticky hot flesh to the world in barely there short-shorts as she and bestie Katie (India Menuez) move their meager belongings way down the subway line and into a cheap sublet in Ridgewood, Queens.
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Wood captures the carefree ignorance of youthful liberation in the tangled limbs and clouds of weed smoke that dot the girls’ off-off-campus summer life: a rose-colored independence that slowly begins to close in on the unwitting Leah as she devours every new taste and temptation shoved in her face. As a pretty young thing who still gets care packages and rent money from mom and dad, she ventures into the big world coasting on the overinflated sense of security that’s been drilled into every second of her sheltered life—a life maybe a little too boring, a little too safe, that she can’t help but flirt with danger when it winks at her.
Despite her relative aimlessness—she’s a liberal arts major, because of course she is—Leah works a mindless unpaid internship at a pretentious art magazine, one of several entirely believable and simultaneously satirical details that lend White Girl its snarky authenticity. Like a wild weed in the wind, she throws herself toward every new sensation that comes her way with a ravenous, wide-eyed sense of curiosity. So when her scumbag boss (Justin Bartha) ushers her into his office for a literal cocaine and sex on-the-job blowjob, she ends up on her knees before she, or we, can even decide if it’s something she actually wants.
Leah’s equally oblivious to the different power dynamics that swirl in the mostly Latino neighborhood she’s just moved into. Venturing out with a smile to buy weed from the Puerto Rican dealers on her corner, she’s taken aback by a rude rebuff from Blue (Brian Marc). But even the soulfully sensitive Blue can’t resist Leah’s charms. He swiftly falls in love—she, at least, in lustful like—and, caught up in Leah’s naïve ambition, begins slinging his stashes of “white girl” to her Manhattan cokehead coworkers.
But alas, after all the backseat sex, drugged-out hazes, and coke-dusted boners snorted in darkened hallways, the party must come to an end. When the pragmatic Blue gets nabbed on his third strike chasing a huge score at Leah’s urging, she’s left with a brick of coke to sell on his behalf and his debts to a violent dealer and a sketchy attorney (Chris Noth) to pay off. Fooling herself into thinking it’ll all work out fine—because everything always somehow did—Leah exploits her newfound feminine power and pays an exorbitant price for her mistake.
Wood’s bold first feature drew comparisons to Larry Clark’s youthquake wake-up call Kids when it debuted this year at Sundance, for better and, according to some horrified critics, for worse. Like Kids, White Girl owns its ugliness with a defiant sense of self-knowledge and boasts a fearless star turn in Saylor, who goes to courageous lengths most young actresses might otherwise balk at.
Saylor, 21, who’s best known for her role on Homeland, breathes a complex duality into the childlike and sexually inquisitive Leah—not a girl, definitely not yet a woman. Her full-bodied portrayal of young womanhood veers from naïve to carnal to sweet and self-destructive in the blink of an eye, making it all the easier to understand the terrible life choices Leah makes, how little she understands of the wolves at her door, and her own potential for raining calamity down upon others.
But Leah’s awakening is an entirely different kind of beast than Clark’s Kids, or Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, another film White Girl has been compared to. Those were seminal films about nihilistic youth gone wild, but here Wood offers a heavier and more personal sense of accountability. White Girl achieves the neat and troubling trick of making Leah, not the criminals or lecherous men with their own designs on her, the architect of her own tragedy while serving up the realest indictment of white privilege in its explosive if sensational coda.
What makes White Girl’s depravity worthwhile is Leah’s brief dawning of awareness, of the food chain she’s been borne into, in which she is alternately predator and prey, exploiter and victim, stuck in the middle of a cascading system of colliding race, class, and gender privileges that undoubtedly bring unjust abuse her way—but also pass the consequences of her own mistakes onto the less fortunate (and, well, less white). Blinded to a lifetime of invisible advantages she hasn’t previously fathomed, it’s her own ignorance that everyone including Leah, the people around her, and the audience cringing along as she careens into one catastrophe after another should be afraid of—not just the evils that bad men do.
