An engaging documentary about the merit and mechanics of its own form, “Middletown” is set deep in the slacker era of 1991, when, in a small town in upstate New York, a vanguarding high school teacher oversees a student project that uncovers a local government conspiracy. Built mostly of camcorder archival footage from a Middletown high school audiovisual class, this often winning, occasionally rudderless film follows the students as they work together to investigate toxic waste being dumped in a nearby landfill. Worse still, the landfill was situated atop a major regional aquifer, suggesting that much of the district’s drinking water was harmfully contaminated.
The documentary was directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the filmmaking duo behind the popular documentary mini-franchise “Boys State” (2020) and “Girls State” (2024). But the observational mode of those films is complemented here by a mountain of pristinely archived camcorder footage originally captured by the former Middletown students. McBaine and Moss anchor the grainy dailies with some reenacted sequences, as well as talking-head interviews with the now-adult classmates.
The hero of “Middletown” is Fred Isseks, a warm but idiosyncratic high school teacher who, in the early 1990s, was granted permission by the school to conceive of an audiovisual course. He named it Electronic English. The class, the film shows, was an experimental free-for-all. Students learned how to use equipment on the fly while shooting makeshift rap music videos or turning their lenses on friends as they goofed around.
Because of its looseness, the course became a haven for unfocused or purposeless teenagers. Isseks even targeted some of the more adrift ones specifically and suggested they sign up. It was that rare adolescent venue where everyone from the shirkers to the jocks to the pleasure-seekers could bask in the promise of a novel technology. Some of Isseks’s more engaged students even became acolytes of a sort, enrolling in as many courses as he offered and standing by him while the other teachers rolled their eyes at his antics.
These were the kids who ended up on a special Isseks assignment: the investigation of the local landfill. In a contemporary interview with Isseks, we learn that he was tipped off to the toxic waste dumping at the time by a farmer, who agreed to be interviewed by Isseks and his class for a haphazard student documentary. The ensuing project, all of the participants acknowledge, was no Laura Poitras joint. Even Isseks was only trained as an English teacher, and although he tries to put on his investigative journalist hat on several occasions, his skills are rudimentary at best. But in granting the kids a space to develop their curiosities and investigative spirit, Isseks accomplished something valuable: He helped them care about the world around them and appreciate their capacity to shape it for the better.
Charismatic male mentors are a cinematic sacred cow, and there is a banality in hearing Isseks’s former underlings pile unconditional praise on him. More engaging is the trove of archival material, particularly the clips that feature Isseks schooling his students in the documentary form. In what was once essentially outtake footage, we see the teacher and classmates embarking on reporting excursions in which Isseks will gently remind the students to capture establishing shots, zoom in on evidence or compose certain shots for maximum effect. There is a Brechtian sort of satisfaction in watching Isseks discuss cinematic vocabulary within a documentary that employs that very language.
“Middletown” loses steam about three-quarters of the way through its running time, when the ostensible reveal — if you can call thirty-years-old news a reveal — feels like an anticlimax against the grand scheme of history. But perhaps McBaine and Moss framed the events that way deliberately. At the end of the day, this is a story about inspiration and individual growth, with the landfill exposé simply being the formative experience through which these once-diffident kids were able to bloom.
McBaine and Moss try to lean into the letdown by showing how, even after the students’ revelation became short-lived national news, there’s nothing for the group to do other than graduate from high school and go on with their rest of their lives. But if earlier segments of “Middletown” suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.
Grade: B
“Middletown” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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