Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine follow their 2020 Sundance favorite by spending a week with the young women of Missouri Girls State.

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a winner at Sundance in 2020 and the Emmys in 2021, walked a delicate line between delivering an inspiring and wholly disheartening look at the civic-minded teens attending Texas’ version of the annual governmental jamboree. 

The haste is even more evident in Moss and McBaine’s wholly logical follow-up, Girls State, which brings an identical formula to a patriotic ritual that’s exactly like Boys State — except for all of the ways it proves to be different over 94 minutes. 

For those who missed Boys State, a quick refresher: Every spring, outstanding high school students (and, once, me) descend on a college campus in each of the 50 states, separated by gender, for a week-long celebration of the policy-making process as idealized by the sponsors at the American Legion. Participants are divided by imaginary political party and asked to engage in mock elections, court cases and more. Real-world and fictionalized ideologies blur as everybody experiences what would happen if, indeed, children were the future. 

With Boys State, the filmmakers were able to look at teens in a traditionally red state to get a glimpse at how a younger and more diverse electorate might change Texas moving forward.

With Girls State, the action shifts to Missouri, which has many similar demographic attributes. It’s a state that votes red in most statewide races, but gets bluer and bluer as you go into its cities and its younger demos.

If Boys State was a real ensemble, in which four or five of the guys emerged as complicated, likable and likably infuriating “characters,” Girls State pretty quickly becomes a star vehicle for Emily, who is something of an idealized conservative — unbending in her faith-based values but eager to engage in non-judgmental conversations with anybody.

That she dominates screen time and doesn’t hesitate to espouse her thoroughly inflexible opposition on pivotal issues like abortion and gun control gives the documentary cover to appear balanced while still being more overtly political than Boys State was. In a gloomy piece of serendipity, the girls are arriving at the Lindenwood University campus just as the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade has been leaked to the media. The Girls State participants collectively have a dual frustration at this real-world shadow over their lives and a program they begin to realize is less rigorous and more driven by rah-rah platitudes than the Boys State program that is, for the first time, taking place on the same campus at the same time. 

It’s an inequality that briefly turns Emily into a feminist crusader (not that she would call herself that), letting the filmmakers gently approach this problem in a way they presumably view as more even-handed than if one of the liberal girls tore into the program’s conflicted messaging, dress code and attitude. In other words, if it bothers even Emily, it must be real. But while she’s a good point-of-entry figure, her journey supersedes the overall story and the stories of her peers.