DN:FILM Roll Red Roll
ROLL RED ROLL is 21st century Americana at just about its grimmest, a can’t-look-away horror about middle American boys and girls, small-town football dreams, alcohol, social media, rape culture, mob mentality and the miserable prices paid for bad behavior and poor judgment.
Nancy Schwartzman’s doc unpeels rotten layer after rotten layer of the notorious story of two Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players charged with the 2012 rape of a high school girl. Schwartzman finds ways to take additional dismaying steps each time you think she’s gone as far as possible. So it’s not enough that the victim wakes up with no recollection of things that were done to her; instead, she starts to learn about those things through social media; it’s not enough that there’s chilling laughter among the perpetrators and their allies, here that gut-wrenching jocularity was captured on photos, video and tweets where it lives on eternally, the kids’ callousness enough to make you shout at the screen. Where you might think it’s fascinating enough that critical initial detective work was done by intrepid blogger Alexandria Goddard, it turns out that she becomes a pariah for bringing the stunning posts out into the open; and when you think it might be enough that the underage perpetrators are brought to justice, Schwartzman manages to find a coda that adds yet another dark underline to the dismaying patterns.
Finally, while this might seem to be a small-town story, Schwartzman renders it so that it’s clear that the intersections here—the overlap of sports culture, youth culture, social media, desensitization to violence, cruelty, an apparent abandonment of both human decency and even a modicum of courage among so many of the involved—are criss-crossing the country on a much larger scale.