Jasmine Stodel’s documentary Kid Candidate chronicles the unlikely 2019 campaign of Hayden Pedigo, a 24-year-old acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer from Amarillo, Texas, who decided to shake-up the political status quo of his hometown and run for city council. Pedigo ran an unconventional campaign, the anti-establishment nature of which was best encapsulated in a series of lo-fi viral videos made by Pedigo himself. But the mischievous sensibility of Pedigo’s campaign never rubs off on the film itself, which is apparent in how it becomes reminiscent of the very political propaganda that Pedigo took on.
Stodel, for one, doesn’t leave us with a valuable sense of the sheer complexity of her subject as a person and political candidate trying to take on an unjust system. Instead, she fawningly and simplistically details how Pedigo overcame a tough childhood with domineering parents to become an inspirational force for good in his community. In essence, Kid Candidate is little more than your run-of-the-mill campaign ad that comes around every election cycle.
In the course of presenting Pedigo’s city council run, Stodel offers a glimpse into the dubious practices of Amarillo’s government. To put the situation simply, a local PAC donates heavily to incumbents to keep them in office, and at the expense of any real progress, leaving those at the bottom of the economic ladder with very little career, education, or social opportunities. The effective but hardly prolonged detailing of how the city government functions on a daily basis proves to be far more compelling than the tracing of Pedigo’s political campaign—so much so that you may be left wishing for a more comprehensive peek behind a city’s veil.
Whatever power that the brief bits of insight into Amarillo’s politics brings to Kid Candidate tends to be eroded in the context of Pedigo’s campaign, since the city’s very real problems are nearly reduced to self-serving political talking points whenever Pedigo is seen pledging to be the one who will fix them. Even the emotional impact of the wrenching individual stories from an assortment of hopeful citizens—victims of Amarillo’s apathetic government—is cheapened when Stodel includes a montage of them voicing their full support for Pedigo.
In the end, these endorsements ring hollow, because they’re indicative of how seemingly every aspect of Kid Candidate’s ingratiating narrative is calculated to portray Pedigo as nothing less than the incorruptible savior that Amarillo has been waited for. In fact, it’s surprising that the film closes without a voiceover from Pedigo saying that he approves this message.
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