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Critics Consensus: Visually striking and grippingly fast-paced, 12 O'Clock Boys asks thought-provoking questions with admirable subtlety and restraint.
Critic Consensus: Visually striking and grippingly fast-paced, 12 O'Clock Boys asks thought-provoking questions with admirable subtlety and restraint.
All Critics (48) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (44) | Rotten (4)
A short, pungent, ambiguous portrait of the poorer sections of Baltimore and the young men who get their kicks riding dirt bikes through the streets en masse, popping wheelies and dodging the police.
Documentary filmmaker Lotfy Nathan explores the outlaw appeal of an inner-city Baltimore dirt-bike gang through the eyes of a 13-year-old wannabe member named Pug.
It could have romanticized its subjects, portraying them as outlaws and folk heroes. Or it could have gone the way of moral panic. To its credit, [it] does neither of these things - or, rather, it does both, in the most subtle and insightful way possible.
Take a closer look, as Lofty Nathan does in his freewheeling debut feature... and bike gangs like the 12 O'Clock Boys start to differentiate as more than just a dangerous nuisance.
[Pug is] a fiercely individual child, but, inevitably, his predicament also symbolizes how poverty can warp a good boy's nature.
[It] spectacularizes black criminality for white middle-class viewers, the primary audience for the festivals and art houses where this film will have its career.
The filmmaking on 12 O'Clock Boys is masterfully even-handed and fastidiously detailed.
This defiance of the law, combined with the skill, speed and excitement, is part of the romance that draws Pug and other kids into the biker life. It is like the wild west.
The result is evocative and compelling, even if it doesn't offer much context or socioeconomic insight into its broader subject.
There's no balance of perspective, but what the feature lacks in fullness it makes up for in pure energy, extracting a sense of life in motion as its influence by a false sense of security.
With stunning footage and a choppy narrative, 12 O'Clock Boys captures the paradoxical feelings driving these young men through the streets of Baltimore.
For a first-time filmmaker, Nathan achieves a remarkable balance, presenting each side with very little bias.
A good if slightly odd documentary. There is nothing triumphant in the expressions of urban black youth on their dirt bikes in Baltimore. They are being a pain in the ass and yet somehow they have some type of glory in the neighbourhood. The activity clearly should be just stamped out.
Super Reviewer
'12 O'Clock Boys'. Tragic as both a character study and broader social commentary on what people live for in their day-to-day struggles. Dangerous escapism as seen by outsiders looking for the temporary kind is darkly ironic. Lotfy Nathan found someone special in Pug. Bright, ambitious, destined for doom. Nature nor nurture have been particularly good to him as a young boy, and it doesn't look like that cycle is stopping anytime soon for him and others in Baltimore. What's been eating away at me ever since I walked out of the theater is how much Nathan's decision to document Pug's quest drove him even further. Would he have done everything he did if a camera wasn't on him? The ending seemed particularly exploitative. You see the pursuit of power, fame and notoriety, driven all the more by social media. The film ending where it does, I'm afraid of what effects this will have on the next generation of Baltimore's 12 O'Clock Boys.
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