Even for the most well-adjusted among us, middle school probably ranked somewhere between an endless wait for the G train and the ninth circle of hell. For 12-year-old Alex Libby, it’s worse.
“They punch me in the jaw, they strangle me, they knock things out of my hand, they sit on me,” Libby says softly in the new documentary “Bully.” “I feel like I belong somewhere else.”
Libby is at the center of the movie, opening Friday, which follows several young people around the country who are bullying victims.
Kelby Johnson is a 16-year-old living in small-town Oklahoma who’s been ostracized because she’s a lesbian. Ja’Meya Jackson, 14, is sitting in a Mississippi jail after stealing her mother’s gun and brandishing it in the face of those bullying her on the school bus. David and Tina Long’s 17-year-old son committed suicide after being picked on. So did the 11-year-old son of Kirk and Laura Smalley.
Director Lee Hirsch shot the movie mostly during the 2009-10 school year and captured Libby’s seventh-grade year at a Sioux City, Iowa, school. The camera rolls as the awkward youngster struggles to make friends, gets called “fish face” and is casually stabbed with a pencil on the bus, as his increasingly frustrated parents struggle to deal with the problem.
“I think bullying is just the last big stone to get unturned,” Hirsch says.
The problem is not necessarily worse now than it has been in decades past — the Department of Education estimates that some 13 million kids are bullied annually — but Hirsch says the issue is having a zeitgeist moment after a publicity push by the government, charities and celebrities like Lady Gaga, who created a foundation to address bullying.
Hirsch was bullied himself and says it led to his decision to make films.
“I think when you’re bullied you feel like you don’t have a voice,” he says. “I realized I could amplify ideas and issues through the power of film.”
The doc premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was snapped up by Harvey Weinstein (who ironically is considered to be Hollywood’s biggest bully).
“Bully” received a well-timed deluge of press after the MPAA slapped it with an R rating because of some course language. A petition drive collected nearly a half-million signatures urging that the rating be overturned, and celebrities including Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp and Michael Jordan have also asked that it be changed.
Although it hasn’t been released yet, “Bully” is already changing lives — at least of those featured in it.
“Alex is not being bullied anymore,” Hirsch says of the main character, whose family recently moved to Oklahoma, in part, because of the film. “He’s got this shine. He’s confident, he’s got girls chasing after him.”
Yep. Just another typical movie star.