By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Director: Liza Mandelup
Country: united_states
Year: 2019
Running time: 99
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8499102/reference
Julie says: “Offline, Austyn Tester is a 16-year-old boy from a poor family in Tennessee who lives in a small house with his mother and brother. Online, he’s something between a motivational speaker and a boy band heartthrob. Austyn’s charisma and clean-cut good looks have won him a devoted audience of teenage girls who leave adoring comments under his photos and beg him for a shout-out during video live streams. By building his internet clout, Austyn hopes to find a way out of his hometown so he can ‘spread positivity’ across the world. And when he gets invited on tour with social media celebrities Julian and Jovani Jara, it looks like his work is paying off.”
“It’s a rather sad story as one might imagine. It’s interesting, but not super engaging as that kind of world (teenagers with charm, charisma, good looks but no apparent entertainment talent getting famous online is very dull). The parts regarding Austin at home and his family life were quite intriguing and I wish that certain things had not been changed/left out about his life at home as the director talked about in the q &a.
“JAWLINE didn’t have a distributor when it premiered at Sundance, but director Liza Mandelup won the ‘Emerging Filmmaker’ award for US documentaries, which spoke well of its odds for getting picked up. In February, Hulu acquired US rights, so it’s only a matter of time before it debuts on the streaming platform.”
Chris says: “This is a peek into the very recent phenomenon of teenage social media celebrities–a lucrative industry that will probably bewilder most viewers over the age of 25, given how unfathomable it was a mere decade ago. The idea of following 16-year-old Austyn Tester, a charming but green aspirant from small-town Tennessee who wants to make a career out of being an “internet boyfriend” to adoring girls is a good one, even if his cautionary tale barely digs deep enough to get at all sides of what it means to be a do-it-yourself celebrity.