White Boy Rick (LBI Productions, Protozoa Pictures, Studio 8, Columbia, Sony, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On February 20 shortly after 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a 2018 movie called White Boy Rick, based on a true story about Richard Wershe, Jr. (Richie Merritt), a white kid from the working-class neighborhood of east Detroit, who at age 14 was recruited by the Detroit Police Department and the FBI to make drug buys and set up local drug dealers for arrest. He was busted three years later when he started dealing drugs himself, much to the disgust of his father, Rochard Wershe, Sr. (Matthew McConaughey at his twitchiest). Eventually his “handlers” at the Detroit Police Department and the FBI turned against him and busted him, and he ended up spending 30 years in prison in Michigan and another three years in Florida after he was somehow convicted of auto theft even though he’d been in a Michigan prison for 30 years. Wershe’s stretch remains the longest ever served in the Michigan penal system for a non-violent crime. Though McConaughey not surprisingly got top billing as Wershe’s dad – himseif a low-life who makes his living buying guns at gun shows and reselling them to drug gangs º and Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie (who’s died in so many of her film roles it’s a surprise to see her still alive and working; she was born January 22, 1932 in, appropriately enough, Detroit, and she’s still alive as of this writing) as his grandparents, this is definitely Merritt’s vehicle. This was Merritt’s first film; he’s since made another crime-themed movie, Clean (2020), done two episodes of the TV series Euphoria, and currently has a film called Lois James in post-production. Judging from his performance here, his later films should be worth watching.

White Boy Rick was directed by Yann Demange and co-written by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller (names that otherwise mean nothing to me), and despite the overall past-is-brown cinematography (the director of photography was Tat Radcliffe,who like so many of his modern-day brethren should be required to watch the 1956 film Slightly Scarlet, directed by Allan Dwan and photographed by John Alton, to see it’s possible to do the classic noir look in color) and the relentless darkness of the story, it’s quite an accomplished film. Richard Wershe, Jr.’s walk on the wild side begins with his dad and his drug-gang clientele for weapons sales – in the opening scene the Wershes are at a gun show talking to a dealer who’s hawking what he claims are genuine Russian-made AK-47’s, and Richard, Sr. recognizes them for what they are, cheap Egyptian knock-offs – and intensifies when his sister Dawn (Bel Powley) runs off with a Black lowlife drug guy named Tyler “Ty” Finney (Lawrence Adjimora). Richard, Sr. catches Ty and Dawn doing it in his home when he returns from the gun show early, threatens Ty with his newly purchased gun and drives him out of the house, which leads Dawn to run out after him even though she’s wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. Eventually Ty gets Dawn hooked on drugs, which gives Richard, Sr. yet another reason to look with disfavor on the drug trade. Since just about everyone else in the drug trade, or at least the part of it Richard,Jr. Is involved with, is Black – even hos point man on the Detroit police narcotics task force is a Black man, Demetrius Johnson (Isaiah Ali), though his FBI contact is a white woman, Snyder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – he inevitably earns the nickname “White Boy Rick.” At one point he and the crew he’s involved with do a jaunt to Las Vegas because they’ve been told – wrongly – that they have V.I.P. tickets to a major boxing match,which they don’t and they’re forced to watch the fight on a

hotel-room TV. We’re also told that the corruption in the Detroit city government reaches as far as the Mayor’s nephew and quite possibly the Mayor himself. The one moment of tenderness in the whole movie is a remarkable scene when Richard, Jr. is presented with the daughter he fathered in a tryst with a Black woman named Brenda, and even Richard, Sr. seems unexpectedly thrilled at realizing he’s a grandfather. White Boy Rick is a relentlessly dark film, both thematically and visually, but it’s also a quite remarkable movie and an example of both the sordidness of the drug trade and the absurdity of America’s decades-long attempt to control drug abuse by making drugs illegal. It’s also quite well directed and acted, and even the soundtrack music, most of it early rap, works quite well both as source music – this is what these people would have been listening to, after all – and a self-justifying glorification of their lifestyle. There’s one hilarious moment in which Richard, Jr. returns from his Vegas trip wearing a necklace with a Star oif David emblem as a pendant. Richard, Jr. has no idea what the emblem means, and he’s shocked when his dad asks him when he converted to Judaism. And it was ironic to read Richard Wershe, Jr.’s Wikipedia page and learn that, after he was finally released from prison in 2020 and filed a lawsuit against the FBIi in 2021 in which he compared the FBI’s treatment of him to child abuse and said, "Had I not been an informant for the task force, I would never have gotten involved with drug gangs or criminality of any sort," he’s once again making his living by selling drugs. Wershe, Jr. now owns a legal marijuana dispensary called “The 8th.”