The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring (2023) 2023 / An absorbing documentary about teenhood, excess, and celebrity obsession

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.