Political Doc Stars

Running With Beto and Knock Down the House are compul sively watchable.

- Shana Naomi Krochmal

America—narratively speaking— loves a winner. Our most popular films feature reluctant but ultimately triumphant heroes (Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games) and scrappy underdogs who slay giants (just about every Star Wars movie). But two of the buzziest feature documentaries of 2019, Running With Beto (on HBO May 28) and Knock Down the House (on Netflix May 1), are largely about big swings and misses—and yet still manage to be as compelling as their fictional Hollywood counterparts.

What’s even more unexpected is how the stories play out. With a presumed core audience—politically aware, left-leaning types who already know how the campaigns ended—these films are still fundamentally optimistic. And in a media sphere dominated by cable news points of view, each project manages to separate church and state: the filmmakers’ creative decisionmaking vs. the charismatic candidates—and staff who allow access to them.

For fly-on-the-wall documentarians, the challenge in filming a political candidate is slogging through repetitive stump speeches while finding the fleeting interactions that expose the most human moments— especially those the campaign might not want to be seen. For David Modigliani’s Running With Beto, which tracks Beto O’Rourke’s marathon effort to visit all 254 Texas counties and unseat Ted Cruz for Senate in the 2018 midterms, it started with casting the right subject. “I think anyone who has seen him speak in person [feels] a unique magnetism,” the director says of O’Rourke, now 46, who was a relatively unknown congressman from El Paso before the events chronicled in the film. “Our plan A always was ‘He has a chance, but let’s face it, he’s most likely to lose.’ ” That said, “unless he lost badly, ultimately this was going to be a hopeful, inspirational film.”