A personal documentary disguised as expose, Justin Donais‘ glastonburykids tracks a few formative months in the lives of teenage troublemakers Lucas, Ben, Dan, Tom and Dylan — known around their lily-white, upper middle class Connecticut suburb as Dub G, short for “Gay Gangsters” (the “gay” part being presumably as much of a joke as “gangster”, although the film never delves’ into the boys’ sexual lives or preferences). Consciously “influenced” by Jackass, the teens rebel against their peers and parents, and the traditional concept of teen rebellion itself, by eschewing sex and partying and instead devoting their nights and weekends to videotaping themselves masterminding and following through with a series of stunts and pranks around the neighborhood — they call it their “anti-drug.”
As Dub G’s antics begin to escalate in danger and stupidity –– they move from simply smashing the windows of the rejected van that serves as their playhouse, to crashing the van into trees (the driver, in what feels like classic foreshadowing but will only be confirmed as such in the film’s Q & A, says, “If I didn’t have a helmet I would have been almost dead by now”) –– the group begins to split into factions, and Lucas emerges from the pack as its tragic hero, the never-say-die fall guy, the almost-noble fool.
After a first half devoted to documentation of Dub G’s sub-Steve-O juvenilia, wisely edited with the get-in-get-out-don’t-explain precision ((and resultant subversive absurdity) of the real Jackass, glastonbury shifts gears a bit once Lucas is arrested for an extraordinarily dangerous stunt in a mall. To the boys, this is an act of heroism (when his friend is both saved and found out when his pants get caught in the branch of a fake tree, one member of Dub G comments approvingly, “his big Italian balls broke his fall”), but it sets off a chain reaction of consequences that none of the boys are prepared to deal with.
Lucas is filmed discussing this incident and its aftermath while wearing a floppy hat and bed slippers — a preposterous getup which the teenager rocks with the confidence of a self-made star. Later, as proof that he’s reformed, he makes a huge show out of giving a single dollar bill to the town’s apparent single bum. Maybe ironically, Donais’ voice as a filmmaker seems most present in such scenes, when he’s re-presenting his subjects’ self-created world with minimal filters, allowing the Dub G crew’s misery and incredulity over being made to own up for their actions to hang in the air as comedy without need for comment.
It’s where the filmmaker’s voice is missing that’s a problem. That Donais’ camera narrows its focus on Lucas as he drops from one self-destructive bottom to the next seems to make sense — with his charisma, his evident eagerness to be filmed, and his inability to keep himself out of trouble, the boy seems like a filmmaker’s dream subject. And then the credits roll, and we learn that the filmmaker and his star have the same last name, And then the filmmaker admits in the Q & A that Lucas is, in fact his brother, and that he insisted that his brother wear that helmet while driving his van into a tree.
This opens up a whole can of ethical worms that inform the film after the fact, but aren’t acknowleged by it. If glastonburykids is intended as a fly-on-the-wall document (words used by Donais during Thursday night’s Q & A at True/False) of the Dub G boys and their lives, one which includes the footage they take of themselves as well as footage of them taking the footage, why is the fact that one star’s brother is making a documentary about the boys not acknowledged? Why isn’t the relationship between the filmmaker and his brother explored? Without copping to the full story behind the story, glastonburykids, though sometimes fascinating and definitely entertaining, feels incomplete.
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