‘Cheer’ on Netflix is a Searing Look at Never-ending Trauma

Netflix’s Cheer is ostensibly a behind-the-scenes look at the superhuman athleticism that goes into competitive college cheerleading. Over the course of six episodes, we watch as Coach Monica Aldama pushes her eager students to backflip, somersault in the air, and climb to the tippy top of an unstable ladder of limbs. Bones are broken and dreams are shattered, but every Navarro College Cheer student is high on Aldama’s implicit promise: if they listen to her and work hard, they can claim glory at the NCA Collegiate Cheer Championships in Daytona. After all, as of 2019, Aldama had shepherded Navarro to 13 wins.

But Cheer isn’t just about the sacrifices needed to win athletic competitions. By profiling five specific Navarro team members — Gabi Butler, La’Darius Marshall, Jerry Harris, Morgan Simianer, and Lexi Brumback — Cheer examines the effects of physical and emotional trauma on young people. All five cheerleaders start off with a story that seems straight-forward enough and all claim that Navarro has given them a newfound purpose. However, as Cheer unfolds, we learn that each of the five are propelled by their different emotional demons — propelled to give themselves fully to Aldama’s coaching, even if said coaching results in an avalanche of potentially life-altering injuries for her students. Cheer leaves a bittersweet impression, portraying the physical pain these athletes experience as a fair tradeoff for the emotional security of a makeshift family that accepts them as they are.

If Cheer teaches its audience one thing about the insular world of competitive cheerleading, it’s that it’s brutal. We’re consistently told by experts in testimonials that cheerleading is an intense sport, and not just a cutesy dance clique. However, it’s hard to watch the hours of rehearsals in Cheer — all caught in the brash florescent lights of a smallish Corsicana, Texas gym — and not think, “Ow.” We watch as pixie-like girls get hurled into the air, their flesh smacking on the biceps of the boys barely cushioning their fast fall from ten feet up. We see strapping young men grunting through workouts and moaning through back pain. We even see a number of devastating injuries unfold on camera. I’m talking multiple concussions, ankle injuries, and the worst, a dislocated shoulder.

We hear many times over the course of Cheer that the pyramid that Aldama has cooked up for this year’s competition is the most difficult yet. In fact, there were many times I wondered if it was simply too difficult. Simply practicing it causes almost all the flyers to earn concussions, bruised ribs, and even puts one of their top athletes, Mackenzie “Sherbs” Sherburn, on the bench for two months. It doesn’t just take a physical toll, though. We watch as the team’s most celebrated player, Gabi Butler, breaks down from the exhaustion of running it. Butler is an almost superhuman cheerleader known since youth for her flexibility and all-around athleticism, but even she is frustrated by the elements, and remarks on camera that it’s too hard. The number of horrifying injuries we see only proves this.

Now it’s easy to say that these kids hang in there because they want to win that badly, but Cheer suggests their almost masochistic need to impress goes deeper than sheer ambition. Most of the kids interviewed are desperate to make their coach, Monica Aldama, happy. Morgan Simianer even goes so far as to say she would take a bullet for the coach. When you learn that Morgan’s mother abandoned the family and her father left her to live alone in a trailer when she was 14, her ferocious loyalty to the mama bear-like Aldama makes sense. Aldama doesn’t give up on her students; she just pushes them, sometimes past their breaking point.

Cheer‘s most powerful message is that cheerleading offers these kids a chance to belong to something bigger than they already are. For Jerry Harris, it’s his place of pure bliss in a world where he’s had to mourn the early loss of his mother. For La’Darius Marshall, it’s a place where he is allowed to be as loud, as strong, and as gay as he wants without fear of reprobation. For Lexi Brumback, Navarro has offered her the rare second chance in life, after she spent her teen years in and out of serious trouble. Simianer gets the acceptance of a maternal figure in Aldama, while YouTube sensation Gabi Butler gets to dissolve for once into a team. (Butler’s tragedy is a bit different than the others we hear. Because of her early success on YouTube, she’s being milked as the family business and pushed to her mental limits to please.)

However, Cheer subtly asks if that brief window of acceptance is worth a lifetime of physical and mental pain. After the team’s season ends in Daytona, we hear cheerleading expert Natalie Adams explain how former cheerleaders romanticize their time in the sport to an almost obsessive degree. “For many people, it kind of personified that, ‘At one time in my life, I was somebody,” Adams says while we watch b-roll of the Navarro cheerleaders posing like models by the pool. From there, we learn that many of the kids don’t have a Plan B after cheer. Morgan Simianer decides to return to Navarro for an extra year just to stay close to Monica, Gabi Butler’s parents hatch a plan to exploit their daughter’s fame so long as she’s got it, and Lexi Brumback finds herself lost in the club scene after being kicked off the Navarro cheer squad for breaking one of Monica’s cardinal rules.

For whatever reason, the Navarro cheerleaders are forever bound to Monica Aldama. So much so that we see numerous alumni pass through, ruminating on how their tenure with the team was the best time in their lives. It’s suggested that without Navarro, their futures would be hopeless, and maybe that’s true. But to be spared the pain of being lost in life, they have to endure the grueling physical trauma of competition.

Cheer ultimately suggests that trauma begets trauma, whether it’s emotional, physical, or both.

Watch Cheer on Netflix