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I’ve never seen a documentary about Girl Scout Cookies before, so I went into Alysa Nahmias’s “Cookie Queens” figuring that it might include, among other things, a tantalizing history of this beloved American institution
— a rundown of the nine current varieties of Girl Scout Cookie (my favorite: Samoas, obvi! With Tagalongs a close second), a survey of some of the dozens of discontinued flavors (Rasberry Rallies, we hardly knew ye), and — more to the point — a look at how Girl Scout Cookies came to be, how the Girl Scout Cookie season developed into a wholesome Middle American pastime, and what Girl Scout Cookies have meant, through the decades, to those of us who hungrily consume them and to all the girls who’ve devoted themselves to selling boxes of them.
But no! “Cookie Queens” includes none of that stuff. The movie unfolds entirely in the present and never gives you even a fleeting sense of the past, of how Girl Scout Cookies rose in prominence to become the phenomenon they are today. (In case you’re wondering, they were launched in World War I to raise money for U.S. soldiers.) The opening credits, set to the Julie Ruin’s “Cookie Road,” which sounds like a great lost track from the B-52’s, play over black-and-white photographs and old film footage of Girl Scouts from bygone eras. But once the credits are over, the movie gets down to its single-minded theme and obsession: how Girl Scout Cookies, once a quaint piece of Americana, have lurched into their late-capitalist phase, with the girls who sell them vying to become champions by fashioning themselves into 12-year-old entrepreneurial go-getters.
“Cookie Queens” opens with some major stats: how each year, the Girl Scouts sell over $800 million worth of Girl Scout Cookies, and they do it in six weeks. The film then introduces us to the four girls who are its principal subjects, and who will each set their sales goal and attempt to fulfill it through the duration of the Girl Scout Cookie season. There’s 12-year-old Olive from Charlotte, N.C., who still has a twinge of baby talk in her elocution but is already so media savvy that she sounds like an influencer; her goal is to sell 8,000 boxes of cookies. There’s 5-year-old Ara, who has diabetes (a fact the film focuses on with a touch of heavy-handed irony), but is a numbers-crunching dynamo who does Pilates. There’s 8-year-old Shannon Elizabeth from El Paso, Texas, whose goal is to sell 2,750 boxes (as Juliette Lewis said in “Natural Born Killers,” “You’re so specific”), though her mother warns her about the third-week dropoff, when the market for Girl Scout Cookies starts to get saturated.
Then there’s Nikki, a rambunctious and highly competitive 9-year-old from Chino, Ca., with two older sisters, one of whom became Cookie Queen — a champion seller, with a (broken) green-and-gold trophy to show for it. The sisters now join Nikki at her sales table, one of them making up a jingle on the spot (“Come! Buy! Some Girl Scout Cookies! They’re only six dollars! They’re only six dollars!”). Nikki’s mother is there too, shouting, “We take cash and credit card.”
“Cookie Queens” understands that all of this is a bit funny; that’s why it keeps punching up the action with an annoyingly cute musical score. Yet the film, which counts Meghan Markle and Prince Harry among its executive producers, is so focused on each girl’s odyssey of selling that there’s virtually no other dimension to it. As a director, Alysa Nahmias thinks like a reality-show producer — she frames the movie as a contest, inviting us to chortle in admiration at what eager-beaver achievers all four girls are. “Cookie Queens” never deviates from that one note. It’s like “Dance Moms” meets a preteen version of “The Apprentice” meets the 2002 spelling-bee documentary “Spellbound” (a much better film), all built around the hawking of tasty treats.
The parents are more involved than they once were, or probably should be. But with this scale of salesmanship (thousands of boxes), they need to be involved. You’re required to buy the cookie boxes in advance, which prompts one mother to say that she might have to mortgage their house. The profit margin isn’t large: Out of the $6 that each box sells for, the Girl Scout gets to keep $1. The rest goes to the Girl Scout council. Olive, God bless her, says she thinks this is unfair (she’s right), and suggests that a 50-50 split would be more appropriate. For a moment, I thought that’s what the movie was going to turn into — a Girl Scout Cookie “Norma Rae.” But all of that gets dropped rather quickly. “Cookie Queens” is a movie about precocious American girls learning to work the system, not fight it.
The closest the film comes to a moment of unguarded emotion is when a pal of Olive’s says, “I see you as not just a cookie seller. I see you as my best friend.” Awwww! But maybe she’s also giving Olive a word of warning. After appearing on a local TV show, Olive says she thinks the segment went well but that “it was just cookie trivia.” She says it wasn’t necessarily effective from a business point-of-view. You think: Who is this, Marc Andreessen? “Cookie Queens,” like its four young subjects, looks at boxes of Girl Scout Cookies and sees cold hard cash. But the tasty crunch of capitalism, in this case, is mostly in the eye of the beholder.
