The flighty mindset of hyper-online living proves an uneasy solution to the rough gravity check of small-town poverty in “Sugar Babies,” Rachel Fleit‘s documentary portrait of young, hard-up Louisiana women getting by on their wits, wiles and heavily TikTok-filtered faces. A working-class college student in her early twenties with dreams to chase and fees to pay, Autumn Johnson refers to herself as “a sugar baby without the sugar”: Trawling dating sites and social media platforms for moneyed men seeking some virtual flirtation, she plies them for money in exchange for texts and photos, all without ever meeting in person. It’s a living, or at least it seems to be. Beguiled by Autumn’s force of personality, Fleit’s film zeroes in on her and her genial circle, but is sketchier on the social and financial realities of the phenomenon for which it is titled.
Pitched uncertainly between intimate nonfiction character study and a longer journalistic view, “Sugar Babies” is understandably compelled by Autumn as a human subject. By turns funny, bratty and all too vulnerable, she’s a poignant representative of a generation — of women, in particular — thwarted by a stagnant economy in a state where the paltry minimum wage of $7.25/h hasn’t been raised since 2008, and while her solution to the crisis may strike many viewers as ill-advised, she doesn’t want for initiative. While duly mindful of mitigating factors, the film winds up softballing Autumn and her cohorts, avoiding hard or even straightforwardly context-setting questions while prioritizing their point of view.
The result, not unlike Autumn herself, is restless and erratic, sometimes engaging but often adrift. That’s a disappointment from Fleit, whose 2023 doc “Bama Rush” was a more dynamic smartphone snapshot of Gen-Z womanhood, and whose 2021 film “Introducing, Selma Blair” largely avoided the bland pitfalls of celebrity portraiture. Given the hooky subject matter promised by its title, though often set aside for more general slice-of-life observation, “Sugar Babies” may find further docfest slots to follow its competition premiere at Sundance, but feels too slender and discursive for significant exposure beyond the festival circuit.
“I wanna be able to say I did stuff,” says Autumn at the outset of the film in 2021, as she fantasizes about a future life far beyond the confines of Ruston, Louisiana. Her drab hometown — a place, in her words, “where you can’t make money” — is more run-down than usual in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which has also cost Autumn her waitressing job. Though she’s the first in her family to go to college, grade slippage in the wake of a personal funk has stripped her of her scholarship. Needing thousands of dollars for fees, she’s discovered she has a knack for flirting with men online and persuading them to pay her to keep the strictly screen-based rapport going. While keeping dozens of these cyber sugar daddies sweet, she generates further income by charging other young women for TikTok tutorials on this particular art of seduction.
It’s a ploy seemingly lucrative enough that Autumn’s pregnant best friend Bonnie and younger sister Hailey also get in on the act — though Hailey prefers to scam her iPhone suitors by demanding money for photos that she never delivers, seemingly without negative consequences. “The only way for women to make a change is to use these men that have the money and take control, to become the rich,” Hailey says.
It’s a funny line that warrants more interrogation than the film pursues, as the practicalities of the sugar-baby racket become increasingly blurry. We get little sense of how much money the women are making from it (though they always seem strapped for cash), what it costs them in time and mental labor, or even how the interactions tend to proceed, as Fleit evokes Autumn’s online dealings not with screenshots but atmospherically woozy selfie montages. A later reveal that Autumn has reneged on her policy not to meet clients in person is confusingly botched: The build-up to one rendezvous is doomily portrayed, though the outcome is never specified.
The film’s four-year timeline, too, is oddly amorphous: Though there’s extensive, cheerfully ambient footage of Autumn hanging out with her family, friends and on-off boyfriend Mighty, key changes of location and circumstance are more abruptly announced. Mighty is a warm and often perceptive figure who offers more insight on the social tensions and fault lines in Ruston than anyone else in the film. Autumn’s admission that she feels looked down on by wealthier white students at college for being “ghetto” or “ratchet” is another example of a statement that Fleit lets lie, rather than pushing for a more revealing elaboration.
Sociopolitical context, meanwhile, is delivered via jarring insertions of stark factual title cards and newscast footage regarding former Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards’ repeatedly thwarted efforts to raise the minimum wage — a subject that Autumn herself never discusses directly, even as it defines her plight. With such sudden switches to a macroscopic lens, “Sugar Babies” risks talking over the young women to whom it otherwise lends such a sympathetic ear.
