Educational Media Reviews Online

This informative and revealing centerpiece to a projected trilogy exploring the challenges facing American teenage boys in their passage to manhood amply meets the high expectations director Frederick Marx established in its first installment, the acclaimed 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which closely followed the divergent paths of two inner-city Chicago youths from middle school to college. Marx culled the material for the chief segment of Boys to Men? (aptly titled “Are You Listening?”) from interviews he conducted in 2000 with several ethnically and socio-economically diverse groups of 15- 16 year-old boys from the Newark, New Jersey area, resulting in a rich array of highly personalized and candid reflections over a wide range of topics such as adulthood aspirations, body self-image, adult expectations, anger, peer pressure, and relationships with parents, friends and girlfriends. The result powerfully supports Marx’s contention that a “crisis of masculinity” exists among boys today and, moreover, that one of its sources lies in the confusion of contradictory messages they absorbed from the culture at large (particularly from popular media).

The DVD also features three half-hour segments each of which profiles a year in the life of a boy selected among those who appear in “Are You Listening?”: Al-Tran, a fatherless and irresolute African American struggling to stay in school; Spencer, a depressed and angry Caucasian who undergoes brain surgery in hope of ending his epileptic seizures; and Cisco, a fatherless Puerto Rican American whose efforts to re-enter school are aggravated by a dysfunctional mother.

The production values are unobtrusively modest, and optional subtitles are available.