“Join or Die”

“Democracy is a pain in the ass, by the way,” quips one interviewee in the documentary “Join or Die.” Featuring an impressive range of interviewees, from community organizers to politicians such as Hillary Clinton (and even a glimpse of the pope), the movie delivers a host of reasons to join a club amid America’s decline in civic participation. The main character of the story is Robert Putnam, an acclaimed social scientist who published “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” about the decline of social capital in the U.S. since 1950. The documentarian, Pete Davis, is one of Putnam’s acolytes who recently graduated from Harvard Law School. 

The title of the movie presents a clear mandate to join the fight for democracy or watch it perish, and the central conceit of the film is that the way to make our country stronger couldn’t be more fun: Just join a club! The film presents a plethora of overlapping and even contradictory arguments through a collage aesthetic that represents the messy, creative processes of community building. Scientific lines of inquiry are interspersed with B-roll of old movies about detectives or animations about planting seeds.

If you’re looking to be convinced of Davis’ ideas through auteurial editing and cinematic sleight of hand, you’ll need to watch a different doc. But if you want to watch a new filmmaker discover what to do with so much story while refusing easy conclusions, you’re in store for a crash course on all things community and many things America. 

You’ll walk away with plenty of interesting information, like how Italy decentralized its government in the 1970s. You’ll be introduced to compelling characters like the woman who leads Atlanta’s Black cycling community. If you’re like me, you’ll want more from each interviewee up and down the list, especially their theories of wealth iniquity, race, trust and how material conditions influence our ability to hold onto democracy and ourselves. 

This documentary is an introduction to a highly relevant way of thinking about clubs: Our social experiences are incredibly valuable to us as individuals, but it is, in fact, our relationships that hold together the big, unwieldy thing that makes us Americans.