Based on true events, the movie White Boy Rick is set in 1980s Detroit at the height of the crack epidemic and the war on drugs, in a city rife with corruption on every level. White Boy Rick tells the moving story of a blue-collar father, Richard Wershe Sr. and his namesake teenage son, Rick Jr. In a mind-boggling series of events, Rick Jr. enters into a Faustian bargain, becoming an undercover informant and later a drug dealer, manipulated by the very system meant to protect him only to be abandoned by his police handlers and sentenced to life in prison.
This incredible story of the youngest FBI informant in history is inextricably bound to a turbulent, complicated father-son relationship. Richard Sr., equal parts hustler, schemer and dreamer, is doing the best he can to stop the cycle of generational poverty and despair, driven by a sincere love of his kids. His son Rick Jr., caught up in his father’s aspirations, willingly becomes the means by which to achieve his father’s ambitions. But all the while, Richard Sr. also attempts to hold their tenuous and fractured family together – both father and son are ultimately motivated by the love of each other and their family. Their city and government betray them – the institutional injustice and corruption that defined Detroit, the home they loved, would be their undoing.
White Boy Rick is a tarnished American Dream, an improbable tale of fathers and sons, friends and family, a shifting landscape of loyalty and betrayal, where everything has a cost, including love and the ultimate price may be survival. White Boy Rick chronicles three critical years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. as he rises from baby-faced teen to infamous drug dealer before ultimately becoming a pawn to some of Detroit’s most powerful and corrupt politicians.
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