THE STORY – A college student from rural Louisiana uses her social media to create an unconventional online business, aiming to break free from poverty and help her friends. Her ambition leads her down a risky path as she navigates new challenges.
THE CAST – Autumn Johnson
THE TEAM – Rachel Fleit (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 81 Minutes
A unique, semi-universal panic ensued when TikTok suspended its services in the United States on January 18th. For those who’d never used the video-driven social media service, the mass devastation was impossible to understand; for the strange few of us who had the app downloaded but rarely opened it, the natural response was to see if the news was true, followed by an acknowledgment that it indeed was when scrolling was rendered moot and a shrug. But for many, many others, the ban meant something more. The potential for economic insecurity became an immediate concern, given how common influencing has become as a primary (if typically shaky) source of steady income. Those who became the faces of TikTok when the app’s popularity surged during the pandemic likely didn’t have to worry given how their followings had ballooned elsewhere, to the point where they’d been cast in Tubi originals, starred in their own “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”-esque reality shows, or mounted a burgeoning pop music career. (Regrettably, it seems everyone and their mother has attempted to take the latter path).
Yet the not-so-few-and-far-between majority had to deal with an uncomfortable truth: The app they’d made the principal home for their content-driven businesses was now inoperable. Even in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s manipulative effort to extend the app’s life expectancy for two months in exchange for outpourings of gratitude from desperate creators, the platform’s future hangs in the balance, causing hungry content creators to seek alternative avenues for the financial gain it once brought them, albeit sparingly. Someone like Autumn Johnson already seems to have that covered.
Johnson is a lifelong Louisianan with dreams that stretch far beyond the bounds of her Southern home, one she’s never left, “ever, ever, ever.” Despite her lifelong desire to be a lawyer – because she’s so good at arguing with everyone, per her parents – Johnson found success as the spearheading architect of an online sugar baby business. If you, like this critic, experience a visceral eye twitch upon reading those words without the explicit knowledge of what they mean in the Sam Hill, it’s not that complicated once it’s broken down for you. “I’m a sugar baby without the sugar,” Johnson explains. “I text men, and I talk to them, and they send me money.” The catch? She never has to meet them, hence the “online” of it all.
If there’s a key element to this “craft,” if you will, that Fleit’s documentary could examine, it’s one that Johnson dictates within the film’s first few minutes: “So, we literally just sat there for, like, 20 minutes and made, like, $300… for nothing.” Of course, it’s not for nothing. Johnson’s own cost, which is glossed over more than properly investigated, might be nil in the dollar department. Still, as is often the case in these increasingly common situations, the state of being perpetually on display can (and in all likelihood will) come at a price. Whether it is personal or psychological is part of the question, but Johnson’s acknowledgment that she initially took this route because she had to, not because she wanted to, is a key point ripe for discussion. Johnson didn’t come from money and made most of her living by being a waitress, but when COVID hit, so too did the balance of her bank account. After she and her boyfriend “Mighty” broke up, leading to a deep depression that cost her the benefits of a full-ride scholarship to Louisiana Tech University, Johnson discovered sugar babying on TikTok, yet she felt uncomfortable with the aspect of the “job” that would require her to go on real-life dates with the men paying her. After seeing some comments where users mentioned that they wanted “a sugar daddy without the sugar,” she “was like, ‘BOOM.'”
Away Johnson went, creating a Tinder and a MeetMe account, inviting men to chat with her through a fake Snapchat account; in one day, per her explanation, she made $6,000, allowing her to pay the balance of her school dues and paving the road for a viable cash grab. To take it one step further, Johnson – who says she has always felt a calling to mentorship – began teaching other young women how to find success of their own by taking the same path. (For a fee, of course. Advice ain’t free). Her influence – there’s that word again – is the primary focus of “Sugar Babies,” though it doesn’t seem that Fleit is all that willing to dig into what exactly her guidance has afforded others. If anything, the videos of Johnson directing her followers to the link in her bio that pepper the doc from front to back feel like a scam in and of themselves, in the vein of the ads our own social media accounts regularly force-feed us, telling us about a game where matching colored balls will make us enough money to buy a house, or how some unprecedented diet and exercise regimen will turn you from “DAD BOD TO DADDY” in fewer than 30 days.
When Johnson’s closest friends are afforded screen time, they speak more about how cool she can make money so seamlessly than how they’ve benefitted from her line of work. This is what happens when a documentarian takes the bold(er) approach to direct their gaze solely at their subjects and neglects to incorporate the view of insightful outsiders, even if those purviews are typically limited to news broadcast rips and broad-reaching headlines. But when the field of vision is as limited as it is here, leaving Johnson and her close-knit circle of pals to speak entirely for themselves without checks or balances, the body of work ultimately renders itself one-dimensional.
That’s why the word “could” applies better to Fleit’s examination here than the word “does,” as a skeptical viewer is bound to wish that the director/producer would have attempted to poke holes in her subject’s self-prescribed logic rather than allowing it to flow freely without even the mildest form of interrogation Of course, it’s worth remembering that those put on camera in “Sugar Babies” are primarily teenagers, notably ones who come from little and have found an easy way to pave their own way. What else are you meant to follow, especially when the very occasional question from the film’s off-screen director is met with giggles and comments like “Oh, dead ass” and “Periodt?” Yet there’s an agreement that goes hand-in-hand with documentary filmmaking, that the filmmaker in question and their subjects are meant to meet in the middle, with access being a fundamental understanding once granted. It’s not that Johnson’s access into her world isn’t enough to make the contents of “Sugar Babies” enjoyable, but that Fleit fails to do much directing at all, seeming far more willing to let her interviewees dictate the terms and the doc’s narrative direction without pushing back in the slightest.
It’s a pattern that extends throughout the film, even as it forays into areas involving Mighty’s assessment of Louisiana’s socioeconomic split – which he says is divided directly down the middle by the interstate – the state’s efforts to set a minimum wage limit for minors, and racial implications of how Johnson and her white friends speak, something she brings up on her own accord. She says that her Louisiana Tech classmates must think she is “tryin’ to be black, talkin’ like that,” yet she frequently describes herself as “ghetto” and “ratchet,” two catch-all, outdated terms that Fleit exposes without exploring. The director made similar errors in her 2023 documentary “Bama Rush,” a self-described exposé on the treatment young women are subjected to in sororities that played more like a therapy session for its filmmaker designed to exorcise her personal demons from having experienced what is displayed in the film.
Were the same sort of criticism applied to “Sugar Babies,” it would have to make note of how the film has been advertised as a “poignant commentary on poverty and dignity in modern America,” both of which it fails to be with any real resonance. It’s far more in line with its other sales-pitchy descriptors: “judgment-free” and “illuminating.” These fit the bill, but documentaries, no matter who they are about, aren’t designed to be flattering; that’s precisely why so many of them fail. This one isn’t all flattering, but neither is the harsh glow of a ring light: Those contraptions are only designed to make the foregrounded image brighter, even if what you see in the background should be the thing to which we lend more of our focus.
