Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Knock Down The House’ A Netflix Documentary About How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez And Other Women Tried To Topple Congress’ Status Quo

No matter how you may feel about her, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress in 2018 is remarkable, as she was not only a working-class candidate who shunned corporate contributions, but she defeated Congress’s fourth-most powerful Democrat, Joe Crowley, in the process. But she wasn’t the only working-class woman running for a seat on Capital Hill; Knock Down The House takes a look at the campaigns of AOC and three other candidates that show where the future of politics may be going. Read on for more…

KNOCK DOWN THE HOUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Most of us know the biggest star of the 2018 midterm elections: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old activist and bartender who defeated 18-year-incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District. Her grassroots campaign, focusing on the fact that she’s working class and she will fight for the issues her working class constituents are most concerned about — wages, health insurance, despair over the country’s immigration policy — surprised everyone as she surged to victory, which essentially gave her the congressional seat she now holds.

Knock Down The House, directed Rachel Lears (The Hands That Feed), follows AOC’s campaign from the time she met with non-profit organizations The New Congress and Justice Democrats, both of which are looking to make Congress less white, male and wealthy, all the way to the day after her shocking primary victory. But the documentary also looks at three other women, all of whom got national attention for their races, but ended up losing to the entrenched incumbent or career politician they were running against.

In West Virginia, Paula Jean Swearengin, the daughter of a coal miner, ran for Senate against Joseph Manchin because she was fed up with friends and relatives getting sick because of their work in the coal industry and angry at the fact that Manchin takes his money from big coal companies. In Nevada, Amy Vilela is a former CFO who worked her way up from poverty to that position, yet when her daughter died of a lung embolism that could have been prevented if she had insurance, she knows what those companies do to maximize profits without much care about the people their policies affect. And in St Louis, Cori Bush, a nurse and pastor, runs for Congress because of her anger over cases like the Mike Brown shooting and the fact that, four years after the Ferguson protests, not much has changed.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any movie about contentious campaigns, like Street Fight or The War Room.

Performance Worth Watching: Listen, there’s a reason why AOC has become a national star in such a short time; she’s determined, she comes off sincere about her working-class support because she used to be working class, and she has some serious balls and doesn’t seem to be afraid of anyone. In the film, we pull back a bit and see more of her life, from her boyfriend Riley Roberts to her mother and siblings. We also get a lot of backstory about her life, especially how her mother and now-deceased father worked hard to eke out a middle-class living for their family.

Memorable Dialogue: AOC and Roberts compare her mailer to the one Crowley sends out. “This is the difference between an organizer and a strategist,” she says. Her flyer has practical information, like when the primary is, but Crowley just blusters in his flyer about “fighting Trump” and doesn’t talk about what he’ll do to help his district going forward. “Trump 3 times, commitment zero times,” she says.

Our Take: We get the feeling that Lears and her co-writer/co-producer Robin Blotnick never thought they were making a documentary about Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign when they started following all four women around. But as the primary approached in early 2018, it became apparent that AOC was having an effect on the Crowley campaign, as Crowley actually came out for debates he was shunning earlier in the campaign. Ocasio-Cortez’s momentum, fueled by her determination, quickly became the film’s focal point, and knowing what we know now about how things shook out, it feels like she’d be the natural focus of the film.

But the film is structured in a way that show that the filmmakers wanted to pay homage to Swearengin, Bush and Vilela as well, despite the fact that their campaigns fell far short. If even one of them won their primary or at least made the incumbent or career politician sweat, they may have gotten more screen time. But the fact that the other three women got soundly defeated leaves us a bit cold. Yes, we hear AOC tell one of the vanquished candidates that “it’ll take 100 of us losing for one of us to win,” and the film still shows how the growing grassroots, working-class movement is still in its infancy, but it makes the film tilt a little too far towards the one campaign that was actually successful. Had they chosen to follow Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, we would have seen a bit more of a balanced movie. But they went with the candidates they went with, win or lose; that’s the risk you take as a documentary filmmaker.

What the film did accomplish was to show AOC as more than the talking head and tweeting/Instastory machine that has been her brand since she burst onto the scene. It showed her sincerity, her ambition, and — yes — that she has an agenda that goes beyond helping the 14th. But it shows that agenda in a larger context, as all the candidates profiled are ones that were backed by New Congress and Justice Democrats. She just ended up being the star of the group.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even if Knock Down The House is more or less How AOC Beat The Democratic Machine, it’s still a worthwhile look at the burgeoning working-class movement that already has Congress looking a lot different than it used to.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Knock Down The House on Netflix