Cusp throws a Friday night flashlight on the lives of three Texas teens

For some, the phrase “teens in Texas” conjures images of genuine adults play-acting as adolescents in football jerseys, cheerleader uniforms, and pickup trucks. If nothing else, the vérité documentary Cusp offers a sobering reminder of the way pop culture can distort our understanding of how young middle- and high-schoolers really are.

At the center of the film are three girls, growing up in a Texas military town. Co-directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt befriended them during a road trip across the United States, and ended up following them around during their summer break with a camera, microphone, and $10 flashlight. Cusp goes where the girls go, spending time with their friends and boyfriends at parties and bonfires and McDonald’s (where the girls always seem most excited to go). Their parents remain largely off screen, heard but rarely seen.

The trio embodies an array of contrasts. Physically, they seem barely out of childhood, joking about when they’ll acquire cleavage. Emotionally, they’re already exhausted by what they’ve lived through. Two of the three were sexually abused as children, and their respective first times qualify as rape. They mimic “Black voice” and use internet slang co-opted from Black people, but don’t seem to have any Black friends. They longingly discuss leaving home as soon as they turn 18, but no one mentions what those future plans could entail. And Hill and Bethencourt, taking a fairly hands-off approach, don’t ask.

The documentary falls into a pattern that becomes somewhat repetitive: sitting-on-bed confessionals; squabbles with parents; lingering shots of discarded beer cans, cigarettes, and Juuls; lanky limbs poking out of too-short shorts. This is every-parent’s-worst-nightmare stuff, but it’s framed against the wide-open beauty of rural Texas. A glowing cigarette mimics the burnt-orange of a setting sun far in the distance. Girls search for frogs in a gently gurgling creek before talking about a date rape they heard about. A lonely bird sits on an electrical wire, remaining after the flock leaves it behind—B-roll that evokes an earlier shot of a girl standing on the porch of her parents’ trailer home, looking out at the wide stretch of grass and dirt before her.

With only one parental interview, and no experts or officials to speak on the insidious effects of rape culture, Cusp instead remains in lock-step with the girls. That level of intimate access inspires in viewers both protectiveness and concern that the girls don’t always seem to exhibit for themselves. Are we victim-blaming by wondering if they know they don’t have to go to every party, don’t have to entertain older boys who are technically men, don’t have to drink and smoke everything offered? Are we dismissing their agency, or their attempts at freedom, by considering this self-destructive behavior? Cusp is so on the ground with Brittney, Aaloni, and Autumn that it asks these questions of us, but it never gets around to asking questions of them.

What are their dreams or desires? What are their favorite subjects, or movies, or childhood memories? How did these girls even become friends? Cusp warns against the commodification of young women, but then flattens them in a somewhat similar way, linking the girls by their trauma and not much else. The messy mixture of rawness, naiveté, cynicism, and defiance that Cusp finds in the three reveals the contradictions of this transitional time, and of simultaneously growing up too much in some ways and not enough in others. But in walking the line between asking empathy for these girls and also using them as a sort of cautionary tale, Cusp fails to offer more than a somewhat surface-level understanding of toxic masculinity.

To Hill and Bethencourt’s credit, they do build a sense of milieu that’s simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive, thoughtfully subverting romanticized assumptions about the vast Texas country by showing how stifling these small towns can really be. But that scene-setting eventually betrays what the documentary doesn’t show about how else the girls spend their time. “I party every day and get drunk. Gives you something to do,” Brittney says, but it can’t be all hanging around with boys as they fire guns or staring at phones between chugging 40s, can it? And if it is, what else do these girls want? “Personally, I fucking hate teenagers. Yes, I’m saying I hate myself,” Autumn confesses, but Cusp leaves that statement hanging, as it does so many others from the girls every time they dare to look inward.

Cusp is most impactful when showing how casually these girls discuss sexual harassment and abuse, how frank they are about having endured it, and how they are coaxed or manipulated into patterns of behavior thanks to peer pressure and resignation. They all have stories about older boys telling them age is “nothing but a number,” and when they hear about a recent assault by a guy they know to be a recurring bad actor, Aaloni’s “Dang, he really out here raping kids” is tellingly deadpan. The candor with which the three recount what’s happened to them is brave and upsetting in equal measure, and Cusp intends that duality. Where it comes up short is in tracing the bonds between these girls outside of the misogyny they’ve endured and, to some degree, accepted. Without a deeper look into their lives, Cusp ends up treating them as rather interchangeable—a failure at odds with its stabs at authenticity.