A teenager dragged up in a low-income broken home finds himself drawn to the easy answers of drugs and guns. Soon he’s a pawn, caught between the law and the lawless. It’s a narrative that plays out on a daily basis in pretty much every inner-city neighbourhood in the US. So what makes the story of Rick Wershe Jr (an impassive Richie Merritt) worthy of a grit-and-glamour movie biopic, while all the other kids end up as statistics? Depressingly, the clue is in the title.
Rick was raised by his father (Matthew McConaughey, with a deep-fried accent and a defeated smile) in a Detroit household which is not so much blue collar, more no collar at all. Like the film’s bumping soundtrack of funk and hip-hop, Rick’s cultural influences are African American. And perhaps through lack of guidance, perhaps because Rick is not very bright, he is drawn to gangster archetypes, fetishising AK-47s and blundering into the inner circle of the local crack kingpin.
What makes him vulnerable to the lure of gangsters also makes him an ideal target for the FBI, fronted by a flinty Jennifer Jason Leigh, which is looking for an insider. Rick becomes the youngest FBI informant in history, and, gently nudged by agents looking to take down a narcotics ring, he becomes a pusher.
Unlike the previous film by director Yann Demange – the lean and nervy Northern Ireland-set thriller ’71 – this is film-making which has run to flab; which, like its slow-witted protagonist, is a couple of steps behind the action. The music choices inject energy, but it’s difficult to care about a character who is too dumb to care about himself.
