Erin Lee Carr, the director of Britney vs Spears, returns with a scoop. Ringleader is not just another pop culture doc, because it features a first-time interview with the young woman at the center of The Bling Ring robberies in Hollywood, Rachel Lee. But this is not the kind of film that tries to pick the brains of a perpetrator. Instead, the director positions herself as a journalist in front of her subject and questions her frankly, an approach resulting in amusing frankness. However, the rest of the doc feels too formulaic in the way it stitches together personal archive footage that is more or less neutral. Banking too much on exclusivity when it comes to the interview, already clouds it with expectations. One is led to ask whether Lee is good, bad, repentant or sociopathic and project onto her such qualities—a move which invites a similar fascination with celebrity life the film tries to untangle.
In a candid, first-time interview with Rachel Lee, the so-called teenage mastermind behind a string of high-profile celebrity robberies in 2008 and 2009, the film examines the motivations of Lee and a group of her friends who broke into celebrity homes in Hollywood to ransack and steal, exploring the possible reasons behind her actions including mental health issues and addictions, as well as the climate of celebrity excess that fueled the teens, recontextualizing the events behind the sensational headlines.
Rachel Lee, the alleged leader of The Bling Ring robberies in the early 2000s, speaks out in front of camera for the first time.
The spotlight is all on Rachel Lee, her recollections, her truth, her lies. Even if at first she seems like a very tame interviewee, Erin Lee Car brings out the contradictions in her story by simply asking the right questions. It's fascinating to witness someone's solid narrative crack here and there, and the film captures these moments quite aptly: the scene cuts to a side angle of Lee every time she's caught in a lie. This was probably a decision taken at the editing stage, to use a cut to a particular, unconventional angle out of a three camera set-up every time the director prods Rachel for her unreliable storytelling. The trust between them two is palpable and no wonder: it took a year of convincing to gain this access.
Double-billing this with Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, there is no other way.
