For three years, I jogged around the Washington DC monuments every day after work. With my music in my ears and my eyes wide open, I loved seeing the visitors from all over the world as they marveled at the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and all the rest.

At some point, I realized that teens on field trips from Red states spent their first dollars on MAGA hats (yes, made in China and sold on the street corners by immigrants) as a way of displaying some “I’m out of town and my parents are back home” swagger.

Tribal? Yes. Obnoxious? Yes.

So when I saw the now famous 2019 viral video of a smirking white boy staring down a 65 year old native american who was banging a drum, I instantly had an opinion. “Yep, those are the asshole kids I see every day on my jogging route. I mean, all teenagers can be assholes, but the red hats were an especially “in-your-face” accessory.

Filmmaker Jonathan Schroder felt the same way when he saw the video. Schroder is an alum from the same school- the elite Covington Catholic school in Kentucky. He had been the football team Captain. He was irate and embarrassed for his alma mater.

But then more details started to emerge in the days that followed. Was Nicholas Sandmann, the smirking teen, egged on by his classmates, really doing anything wrong? Was there more to the story than met the eye?

We all instantly jumped to conclusions- different ones, but we still thought we knew the story from having watched a few minutes of video.  I hate using the phrase “The Media,” because it is essentially a term without meaning in the era of competing channels like Fox News and MSNBC. But in this case, the media were culpable. Many journalists later retracted some of their initial reporting.

So, Jonathan Schroder and his producer felt duped by the coverage – cheated out of the truth and their beloved school made to look bad in the process.

But instead of just presenting the side of things that agrees with his thoughts, Schroder has made a thoughtful, fair, and more complete look at the video and that day and the days after.

It turns out that the native American man fudged his military record and used his personal contact info to receive donations and, well, he wasn’t quite the benevolent hero that the media first portrayed him as.

It also turns out that there are Covington Catholic parents who are willing to go on camera and dispute the notion of “white privilege,” and defend the boys as just chanting school cheers on the steps of the Lincoln, and nothing more sinister.

Schroder gets contemplative, non-hysterical, low on the rhetoric, thoughts from journalists of color and from some of his own friends who say they believe as strongly as ever that the kids weren’t the innocent, rosy cheeked cherubs that their attorney and public relations team put forth.

We also see Schroder working the phones and emails, trying desperately to get interviews with both Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, the native american man. This particular device is one we’ve seen in countless other documentaries and doesn’t add much to the narrative.

Like Schroder’s friends, my mind hasn’t changed about a lot of the things that happened that day, but he did convince me that there was more to the story than the short video revealed and that all parties concerned were less than honest about how they’ve represented themselves – on all sides.

It’s nice, not to mention extremely rare, to see someone really striving to be fair and to let everyone have their say. The Boys in Red Hats is practically a public service for doing so, not to mention a good watch.

The Boys in Red Hats Opens in Theaters and Virtual Cinemas July 16th.