‘Bucks County, USA’ Review: An Enraging, Exhausting Doc on How American Politics Weaponizes Our Kids
Late in the second episode of “Bucks County, USA,” two teachers on opposing sides of their town’s ongoing ideological rift decide to sit down and hash out their issues. Katherine, a recent retiree with a progressive mindset, invites current third-grade teacher and moderate-conservative Vonna over to break bread over wine, cheese, and not-so-spirited debate. Both women are tired of the intense rhetoric dividing Doylestown, PA, and while they each recognize they can’t settle every polarizing issue in one night, they’re intent on building a bridge to better, clearer communication going forward.
The speed with which their bipartisan intentions fall apart is as remarkable, even if the result is unsurprising. Katherine’s relatively safe opening assertion — that both sides are making hateful comments about each other — falls on deaf ears, as Vonna immediately pivots into how she feels personally and unjustly attacked in ways that are more personal and more unjust than anything progressives may have faced. After an early emergency time out for some cheese, Katherine tries again, admitting how hard it is to have these conversations and how happy she is that they’re trying to dig into the issues instead of avoiding them with booze and snacks. But despite a shared civil tone, Vonna goes right back to her guns, complaining that Democrats are trying to “indoctrinate” and “groom” children “all over the nation” so they can control future generations.
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“What you are seeing as a nationwide effort to lead kids in a direction,” Katherine says, “I see change in the culture and kids rejecting a rigid way of thinking that doesn’t match their experience of the world.” Vonna does not engage. She doesn’t pick up Katherine’s point and move the conversation forward. She doesn’t ask any questions or acknowledge Katherine’s viewpoint in any way. Mirroring the conservative mentality to a frightening degree, she instead just goes back to her original talking point: “There is grooming happening,” she says. “Something is happening, and it’s distressing.”
On that last part, I think we can all agree. Something is happening, and it’s very, very distressing. Even when red and blue voters drop their pitchforks, they’re still unable to hear, debate, or develop each other’s ideas. And for all their concern over the children, any attempt to actually acknowledge the kids’ perspective is often missing from the debates tearing Doylestown apart. Some students speak up at the hostile school board meetings, but their voices aren’t heard. (One chides the sitting board for not listening to her as she’s still speaking.) Some kids participate in peaceful protests, but the parents who disagree aren’t showing up to hear them out. The kids are not all right, and every adult thinks they’re the one who knows why.
“Bucks County, PA” tries to correct that imbalance — and search for a broader solution to our disastrous political times — by centering its five-part series (two episodes of which were screened at Sundance) on two teenage best friends: one a liberal, the other a conservative. Evi is all smiles, all the time. She loves the “Hamilton” soundtrack, and she’s known as The Puffy Skirt Girl around school for her big, colorful, everyday ensembles. Along with her mother, Lela, Evi does everything she can to support her LGBTQ friends, create a safe environment in school, and embrace fact-based lessons in history, her favorite subject.
Vanessa also loves history, and we first meet her and Evi at a local reenactment of George Washington crossing the Delaware river. But Vanessa is more introverted than her giggly best friend. She’s really into card throwing, which she picked up from an online video, and she’s “mellow,” soft-spoken, and shy, compared to Evi. “We’re polar opposites, but we find the best things to connect over,” Vanessa says about her friendship. “We put aside our differences, our different political beliefs, and we just bond over shared interests.”
In the first two episodes, time with Evi and Vanessa is few and far between, which can make it difficult to appreciate how, exactly, they navigate their inevitable differences of opinion. What their friendship actually looks like has yet to come into focus, even when co-directors Barry Levinson and Robert May position them as recurrent narrators speaking directly to the audience. (“I’m Vanessa,” Vanessa says, “and I’m Evi,” Evi adds, before they jointly say, “and this is the story of our town.”) It’s clear the BFFs get along, but do they ever fight? Do they simply not talk about tough topics? And if they do, can they change each other’s minds?
Their parents certainly worry about the latter, since Evi isn’t exactly encouraged to go to Vanessa’s house. After all, that’s where right-wing venture capitalist Paul Martino lives, the self-appointed leader of the local conservative movement who Lela says “manipulated our school boards in an enormous way.” Martino, a balding, paunchy venture capitalist makes for an easy villain, like when he brags about installing “160 school board members” by spending $500,000 on campaign donations. He talks a lot — about his friend Mark Meckler, who “started the tea party,” about “woke” this and “leftists” that — but his arguments tend to boil down to the same might-makes-right perspective: He won, they lost, so everyone should just get over it already and stop picking on the old rich guy.
Martino isn’t a complicated figure, and it’s easy to spot other common American political personas throughout “Bucks County, USA”: There are the people who can only see themselves as victims and people who scoff at snowflakes for being too soft. (Often, these are the same people.) There are nutjob conspiracy theorists marching down Main Street and quiet folks desperate to avoid getting involved. There are personal vendettas framed as political positions and political positions rooted in a plea for human decency. It’s not hard to see our national reflection in the citizens of Bucks County.
But “Bucks County, USA” struggles to cut through the noise and illustrate the flaws in these worldviews. It’s much more concerned with hearing everyone out, with creating balance rather than crafting a point of view (beyond how American politics has weaponized children). That could change in the final three episodes, once the scene-setting is out of the way and the documentary series can hone in on its ostensible main subjects, Evi and Vanessa. But the initial episodes get swept up in recapping the past few years of political events while indulging adult perspectives that feel outdated, if not outright regressive. Again and again, various residents express a common sentiment: “Things would get better if people would just listen to each other.” But just as often, it becomes clear what they really mean is, “Things would get better if people would just listen to me.”
Wine and cheese night with the two teachers is a concise illustration of why hearing from everyone equally isn’t the answer, and earlier in the documentary, there’s a meaningful, if largely dispiriting, parallel encounter. Evi and Vanessa, in an attempt to help their fellow kids, host a student roundtable to talk about why the school board recently voted to remove pride flags from school grounds. One young man asks if pride flags are there to make kids feel safe, why not just tell everyone they’re safe at school, rather than imply as much by putting up flags for “every group” that feels “a little bit” unsafe, especially when those flags and signs can “skew” other students’ views. “It should go without saying that teachers support their students,” another boy says.
“Yeah, in a perfect world,” Evi replies, “you would know, guaranteed, going into a classroom that your teacher supports you. But in our world, you don’t know that.” Another girl jumps in and says, “There was this one teacher when I was in middle school who, accidentally, said really horrible things about me being LGBTQ on a Teams call. That really showed me that not every teacher [supports me]. Every teacher could hate me for who I am. But when I go into a classroom and I see a pride flag or an ally sticker, that shows me that teacher has my back and is going to create a safe space at that school, no matter what.”
Unfortunately, the debate doesn’t end there. The kids who are resistant to the flags continue arguing their point, and the scene ends with a rather vague statement of coming together around what unites us, instead of becoming further separated by our differences. In that moment, it’s easy (and infuriating) to see how these students will grow up to become their parents and teachers, having the same arguments over issues only some of them seem to understand. But taken as a whole, the roundtable discussion shows much more earnest engagement and a slightly stronger desire to learn than whenever adults toss buzzwords at one another. There’s a curiosity present, especially in the silences, that lends hope to an otherwise exhausting debate. It’s almost like these students have their own way of thinking, their own approach to the world’s problems, and their own desire to change the culture for the better.
“Bucks County, USA” could use more of their perspective, but then again, so could Bucks County, PA.
Grade: B-
“Bucks County, USA” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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