Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cusp’ on Showtime, a Compassionate, Upsetting Documentary Capturing the Lives of Three Teen Girls in Texas

One evening, Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt were filling their tank at a rural Texas gas station when they met three teenage girls, who would soon let them into their lives. The result is Showtime documentary Cusp, which follows the three girls during a lazy hangout summer of smoking and drinking, being with boys and their guns, and sharing many intimate, disquieting stories about their families and sex lives. If the film is too intimate or simply revelatory is up for debate, but there’s no doubt it leaves a significant impression.

‘CUSP’: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “I feel like what most girls suffer from is, they’re not seen,” Autumn says in voiceover, as we watch a scene of her and her friends standing by a bonfire. Well, she and two of her friends, all about 16 years old give or take, are about to be seen — and heard — like never before. Brittney says she always hangs out with older people because, she insists, “I’m mature enough to be an adult.” Aaloni is a self-described tough girl who doesn’t take any shit. Autumn says she’s different from other girls because she drinks but doesn’t get drunk, and thinks before she acts. The next 80 minutes, which cover roughly one summer in their lives, will see them contradict all of these statements. But they’re stupid in the way that all young people are, and they’re bored, and they’re traumatized, and you will forgive them, and maybe grow to love them a little bit.

The documentary’s opening shot is telling: Two girls taking selfies while the older boys they hang out with trot out a machine gun and pistols for some target practice. We watch Autumn, Aaloni and Brittney as they party and lay around, as they pop zits on each other’s backs, (it’s just a fact of life, they say), as they build sandcastles and jump into the swimming hole and pierce each other’s nipples (the graphic details of which remain thankfully off camera). They talk about how a friend of theirs “basically” was raped, but the man who did it is “just like that”:; then they all but shrug their shoulders and start talking about something else. Boys will be boys? We see them at parties with some of those boys, who are older, 18, 19, 20; they have guns and motorcycles, and crush pills on a table and snort the powder. We see nighttime shots of the girls sneaking out of their houses as ominous music drones on the soundtrack, representative of looming threats of — well, of what? Violence? Sure seems like it.

We soon have no choice but to listen intently as the three principals share their backgrounds. Autumn was repeatedly sexually abused while her mother looked the other way; now she’s in therapy and lives with her ailing father, who’s attached to an oxygen tank. She says her boyfriend is respectful and knows everything about her; we see them doze off in bed with his hand up her shirt; he’ll dump her before the documentary ends. Brittney basically lives with her older boyfriend, occasionally coming home for a night for family time, which she sees as pointless, because her parents just get drunk and fight; she, too, was subject to repeated sexual abuse when she was younger. Aaloni’s mother is a character in this film, sort of just one of the girls, and she stood by her husband, Aaloni’s father, through very difficult times, much of it related to his time in the military, punctuated by long absences and subsequent PTSD. Aaloni and her siblings don’t like their dad; we hear him, off camera, yelling at Aaloni and all but refusing to listen to her as she tries to share her feelings. This is the truth of these girls’ lives.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cusp is a rough blend of the troubled-teen intimacy of Minding the Gap with the TMI vibes of American Murder: The Family Next Door and Catherine Hardwicke’s girls-out-of-control fiction shockerThirteen.

Performance Worth Watching: Aaloni, Brittney and Autumn are complex, flawed people who deserve our empathy (and are not alone in their flaws and complexities). There are no “performances” here; what we see feels so very raw and real.

Memorable Dialogue: Autumn: “There is no normal in teenage years. We’re all confused.”

Sex and Skin: Startlingly frank discussions about sexual assault, but not in graphic detail.

Our Take: Cusp is a provocative, mesmerizing documentary. Parker and Bethencourt capture their subjects’ lives and surroundings with the poignant, poetic imagery that enhances the film’s sense of intimacy. The filmmakers capture exactly what’s in the title: Three girls on the edge of adulthood. In some moments, they throw mud at each other like children. In others, they drink and smoke cigarettes incessantly, and talk about how they’re often forced to do things adults do before they’re ready to do them, and yes, that almost exclusively includes sexual activity — which the three girls share freely and openly, obviously showing implicit trust in the filmmakers. It’s the kind of trust that surely needs to be earned. Someone’s finally listening to them, and the directors are giving them a platform so they, in the parlance of the times, can “be seen.”

But that’s also a big risk that Autumn, Brittany and Aaloni are taking, opening themselves to potential exploitation. The film doesn’t really feel like it’s using the girls as subjects of cautionary tales so other parents can scare their kids with it. It’s dangerous to trot them out as representatives of a troubled generation, or examples of the results of poor, inattentive parenting. Certainly, the film addresses male-dominated culture in the girls’ many, many conversations about sexual consent; they all separately come to the conclusion that “no” has very little meaning in their world, that the men in their lives are too powerful to confront. And our hearts break for them.

Perhaps Cusp shows how teens raised with social media and modern tech devices are so comfortable in front of cameras, they have no qualms with oversharing. But as we meander into big-picture topics, we can’t forget that this is a movie about Autumn, Brittany and Aaloni, who are statistics in the larger world — a world that documents cases of abuse, self harm, teen drug use — but wondering what the hell they need to do to stop being so. They talk about getting the hell out of their situations, as so many teenagers do. But in their cases, it’s rarely felt so urgent and necessary.

Our Call: Cusp is not an easy watch, but in many ways is a necessary one. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Cusp on Showtime