As much a mournful tone poem as a conventional "issue" documentary, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's film captures Detroit as a once-proud metropolis reeling into Third World status. The primary interview subjects—including a UAW local president and a savvy tavern owner—give voice to the 1-percenter frustrations at corporations that have allowed America’s middle-class-creating manufacturing-base to vanish, and as honest as those feelings may be, they’re all-too-familiar by now. The film is much more successful as a collage of images—not just of conventional urban decay, but of a city that’s almost literally consuming itself to survive, even as both leaders and residents fight to stave off what seems inevitable. The unconventional editing rhythms that bounce quickly from one subject to another might make it hard to grasp on to some of the individual characters, but it also becomes a genuinely effective non-fiction representation of a fundamental storytelling axiom: show, don’t tell. (Scott Renshaw)
