At the Ready

A dose of sobering insight.

Plays like a frightening but necessary exposé of state-sanctioned copaganda targeting young people from marginalized backgrounds to groom them into instruments of their very oppressor.

Crow is so successful in patiently capturing subjects like Kassy, placed in extremely difficult positions, in a grounded manner that illustrates how nuanced the contexts of these issues are.

This disquieting film illustrates that the path to upward mobility comes at a heart-wrenching cost: placing a career on a direct collision course with far more liberal identities.

At the Ready develops strength and empathy as the students profiled do the same.

The film wisely probes the complex intersection of race, politics, law enforcement, and adolescence, showing how the school-to-cop pipeline in America is constructed early in the lives of not only these teenagers but also thousands of others.

That somewhat rote humanizing is no match for the grim framework in which the kids' personal/political lives are processed—every time the film's core premise cuts through the character scaffolding, it's startling.

"At the Ready" doesn't capture all the details, but it still does show an interesting introspective journey.

The films drama plays out against images of President Donald Trump spewing his xenophobic filth.

Its as if Crow saw the proverbial writing on the wallthat her subjects were starting to outgrow the cluband pivoted the narrative so it was more about their coming of age via hard moral decisions than how the Criminal Justice Club shaped their lives