Alex Hopkins stars in Bully. (The Weinstein Company).

An assistant principal is in conference with a distraught six-year old boy. “They called me a fag.” the boy tells the adult, whose follow-up question reveals an appalling cluelessness: “How did that make you feel?” The boy struggles to answer: “It breaks my heart.”

Director Lee Hirsch, armed with a Canon digital SLR that doubled as a shaky video camera, spent a year observing the students of East Middle School in Sioux City, Iowa. Accompanied only by a sound assistant, Hirsch became such a fixture on campus that, he “quickly faded away to the daily drama of a middle school environment.” Hirsch filmed a lot of kids, and as happens in schools, some kids got bullied, like 12-year-old Alex, a Sioux City Iowa kid who’s not just called names but is regularly threatened and punched on the school bus, and on camera.

Hirsch was concerned that other students would pick on Alex more if they knew he was the subject of a documentary, but one wonders how he and any of the other kids featured are treated now that the movie is out. If the PG-13 rating makes Bully more accessible to those who need to see it, I don’t think that means that bullies across America will suddenly gain respect for their peers. There’s a culture at work that no movie can change: after the hanging suicide of 17-year-old Tyler Long, students at his Georgia school reportedly showed up the next day with fake nooses around their necks.

(The Weinstein Company)

Whatever makes kids behave like this isn’t going to be solved by a movie. But if the victims of bullying, and their parents, become more aware of the dangers of such frail psyches under great pressure, then one hopes the heartbreak was not in vain.

If the Sioux City school administrators are any indication, it’s an uphill climb. When Hirsch’s camera captured a bus ride where Alex was subject to verbal and physical violence, he brought the evidence to parents and school officials. One administrator claimed she had ridden that very route. Her verdict? The kids were ”good as gold.”

Alex isn’t the only victim in Bully. Hirsch spoke with four other families affected by bullying, and two of those cases ended in suicide. The director explains in interviews that he was the victim of bullying himself, and hopes that his film can play a role in changing the destructive climate. Bully would be critic proof even without the MPAA rating controversy that gave it cause-célèbre status. How can you pick on a movie about being picked on? I can’t. Bully is probably preaching to the choir of the audiences paying to see it, but if that choir becomes a little more aware of what the children in their lives are up to, on either side of the schoolyard power struggle, then the movie will have done its job.
Bully
Directed by Lee Hirsch
Written by Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen
Running time 99 minutes
Rated PG-13 for violence and strong language