SpencerвЂ™s desperation is a consistent fact of life for the documentaryвЂ™s cast of characters. вЂњIвЂ™ve had a failed marriage, multiple lawsuits, I canвЂ™t raise money the way that I had been, IвЂ™m being treated like a terrorist. вЂњ2018 has been one of the hardest years of my life,вЂќ he tells Lombroso. For every Charlottesville, there are 100 speeches given to mostly empty rooms, events canceled at the last minute by venues horrified by SpencerвЂ™s ideology, and profanity-laden public humiliations at the hands of strangers. One sees Spencer lurching from one failure to another, a man perpetually frustrated by his inability to be loved by a world that has rejected him. In White Noise, Spencer is not the leader of a neo-fascist insurgency on the brink of conquering America, but a divorced outcast who, at the age of 42, has moved back in with his mother. What is notable about the film, then,is less its explosively disturbing moments-the Nazi salutes in Washington, D.C., on the heels of TrumpвЂ™s victory, the deadly chaos of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville-but rather the dreary routine of the piteous lives lived in the empty spaces in between them. All three have taken on outsize roles in our political discourse but in LombrosoвЂ™s documentary they become more visibly human. The three prominent personalities each represent a different subgenre of the alt-right: Spencer stands in for the dyed-in-the-wool white nationalists, Cernovich for the Trumpist conspiracy theorists, and Southern the hard-right grifters. Acolytes of the alt-right are often portrayed as larger-than-life supervillains White Noise reveals them to be broken, deeply isolated individuals.Д«esides Lauren Southern, Pizzagate promulgator Mike Cernovich and white supremacist Richard Spencer are the main subjects of the documentary, although other major figures make tangential appearances. Viewers gain not just a richer understanding of the profound ugliness of the movementвЂ™s devotГ©es but also of the conditions responsible for producing such ugliness: a sense of loneliness in an age of interconnected mass culture, and a yearning for community in an increasingly atomistic world. While most of the mainstream coverage of the alt-right spends little, if any, actual time with its adherents-previous documentaries like Age of Ragegive the significant majority of airtime to вЂњanti-fascistвЂќ activists and Southern Poverty Law Center intellectuals-Lombroso seeks to understand the alt-right as it is made up of real people rather than a faceless force of darkness. The new documentary features 27-year-old Atlantic filmmaker Daniel Lombroso following a handful of the alt-rightвЂ™s most notorious figures for the better part of four years, providing an intimate portrait of a collection of lost, desperately unhappy young men-and, to a lesser extent, women-searching for meaning in a fringe ideology.

Conventional treatments of the coalition of activists, commentators, writers and internet personalities tend to paint the predominantly internet-based movement as an ominous cult of evil with enormous-and ever-increasing-influence in the American political arena.Д«ut White Noise takes a different approach. ItвЂ™s an oddly human moment for a group of characters that are almost exclusively portrayed as a sinister monolith: The superabundance of documentaries, investigative articles, books and internet shorts on the alt-right that have materialized in the years since Donald TrumpвЂ™s rise to power are, as a general rule, sensationalist and partisan affairs. Southern is wearing a black cape, pale makeup, and cheesy plastic vampire teeth. ThereвЂ™s a knock at the door Wintrich hops up from the couch, brimming with excitement as Lauren Southern, the renowned Canadian anti-immigration activist, makes an appearance.

White Noise opens with an awkward Halloween party attended by a collection of alt-right personalities, hosted by Lucian Wintrich-best known for his brief stint as a White House correspondent for the far-right blog Gateway Pundit-in Washington, D.C.

Lauren southern richard spencer