Welcome to Leith is a film about a drinking town with a racist conclave problem. Is that how the t-shirts go?

New York filmmakers Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker rushed out to the North Dakota hamlet (pop. 16) in the fall of 2013 when the self-proclaimed “most famous racist in the world” Craig Cobb announced his intention to purchase enough residences in the dilapidated, dead-tree town of Leith to build a voting majority. It’s gerrymandering from the ground up. By the end of the first part of the film, Cobb is living in a modest two-story rambler, without plumbing (which becomes important later down the line for irksome city council members).

(Spoiler alert: the remainder of this review discusses the events of the film in some detail.)

The hordes don’t come. The only fellow Aryan nationalist bro to move in is Kynan Dutton, his wife Deb Henderson, and their two children. The groundswell doesn’t happen. The footage, nevertheless, affords glimpses into the mental catacombs of a racist. In an outtake that ran in the New York Times, Dutton clarified that he’s a “white separatist,” borrowing from sectarian language. Dutton knows this rhetoric. As he nails boards to his home in Leith, he proudly notes he served in the infantry in Iraq and was “on the ground when the Iraqis first voted.”

It’s kind of a breathtaking moment of contradiction. Democracy — Dutton maybe thinks — was a western European invention. The camera (with spooky horror music playing in the background) then watches him unfurl a “good Reich flag” as he adds to the heraldic banners of white nationalist states flying outside his home. It reminds me of a translation of poet Bob Hickok’s “A Primer” (the line about his drive through Ohio, reading not “corn corn corn Mosque” but instead “house house house Rhodesia enthusiast”).

The term “white supremacist” traditionally has connoted a certain image: skinhead, Nazi tattoo, Confederate insignia on MacBook, hatred of fellow human beings because of their skin color and culture, etc. Lately, the term has come to describe a host of sustained acts of white privilege — supporting Donald Trump’s war on coffee cups, moving to the suburbs, closing the blinds when Black Lives Matter marches past your house. Nichols and Walker’s film could make this tie more explicit, but perhaps for the film’s focus, they don’t.

That’s not to say the film glosses over race. The film does include an obligatory visit to the Southern Poverty Law Center to talk about the violent domestic terrorism incidents perpetrated by white radicals as of late. And there is some celebration when the town rids itself of the new neighbors. But the protagonists in Leith aren’t abolitionists, nor are they necessarily reluctant supporters of racial justice. Viewers never see a long sit-down with the residents about race, assumedly, because they’d rather, in true Midwestern spirit, not talk about it. They want Cobb and Dutton out because the two are worse than racists: they’re instigators.

Nichols and Walker have made a film about a small town. Fittingly, it’s a horror film. And the monster terrorizing the village is explicit, neo-Nazi white radicalism. But their cameras wryly, if rarely, catch the less bombastic, insignia-donning white supremacy that systemically interlocks many towns — not just little old Leith.

Dutton does see himself and his family as the progenitors of a new American way (propaganda posters dot his windows of a cartoonish, voluptuous blonde-haired woman asking to bear the children of young white nationalist’s recruits). But he talks like “just-a-regular-working-class-white” trying to wrap his head around the language of diversity in America. After reciting, quite dispiritedly, that white children are no longer in the majority for “the first time,” he rattles off who is to blame for America’s problems (the litany of “mostly the blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Indians.” And then he corrects himself. “Excuse me, I mean Native Americans.”

It’s another breathtaking moment in the film: the racist’s “code switch.” By changing terminology, Dutton wishes to exonerate himself of any disrespect shown toward others (a stronger vice than racial segregation apparently). He’s learned from the Left.

If Dutton seems a poster child of white fragility, it’s that clear Cobb (who is less interesting as a character, though more bombastic in his eccentric suit coats and trousers) is a supremacist of himself. At a city council proceeding, held around folding tables in what appears to be a forgotten dance hall, Cobb brazenly accuses his neighbor of murdering the neighbor’s own daughter (the victim, we find out, was killed years prior on the West Coast, in events unrelated to the film). In other words, Cobb is easy to despise. He’s an overt, unapologetic bigot who launches into princely, epithet-fueled tirades. He has a deranged grey beard, fiery eyes, and walks in sandals down the dirt roads of Leith carrying a rifle. Trailing behind Cobb, though, at the film’s climax, is the self-proclaimed “working class white” and his wife (in Crocs). Carrying a rifle, Dutton tries to look equally tough. When the sheriff arrives, Cobb firmly puts out his hand and tells his acolytes, “Let me do all the talking.”

The documentary ends with Dutton (and Cobb) imprisoned for months on terrorist threats; both, eventually, accept plea bargains. The film seems to say that even in the most remote municipalities of America, this hotter kind of supremacy just can’t fly anymore.

Craig Cobb recently announced his support of Donald Trump’s presidency. Would Trump probably repudiate Cobb’s support? I don’t know. I’m no Trump apologist, but I’d like to think the Donald would at least distance himself from Cobb, if pressed. The mastery of this film, Welcome to Leith, is that in 86 minutes it basically produces a microcosm of how white America has ever-so-gently started to drop the color-blind mystique of the last 50 years — even in Leith. It’s not enough to simply say, “live and let live.” There’s a rainbow of whites: the caustics, the apologists, and the growing number of people (even in a town of 16) who stand up and say, “not in my backyard.”

The townspeople are an impressive “cast” for a documentary. There’s the do-good rancher/mayor Ryan Schock and his posse of locals — including the town’s lone African-American, who confronts Cobb on the steps of the town hall. This film really could be pitched as a modern western. In fairness, you get the sensation it’s not just bruised egos or fear of Cobb’s gun that compel the townspeople to light Cobb’s house on fire and burn it to the ground. What is the real motivation? Belief in racial tolerance? Again, we don’t know — but we know the mechanism of change. It wasn’t vigilantism. The state — pressured by a new city ordinance mandating all homes be “hooked up” to water and sewer, voted on after Cobb moved to town — had condemned the property.

It’s a wonderful look at the effectiveness of an unfair voting majority.

– Chris Vondracek