Homegrown Review (Glasgow Film Festival 2025)

It’s hard to imagine anyone more detestable than Donald Trump. Whatever your politics, the thought of America being run by a billionaire felon who’s also a serial liar, adjudicated rapist and blatant traitor should curl your toes. In spite of this though, Trump continues to see widespread , many of whom have been radicalised by his rhetoric and noxious lack of empathy. Michael Premo’s documentary Homegrown portrays the lives of three such radicalised Trump ers. It’s a curious idea, particularly for those morbidly curious about the worst side of politics, but the end result comes across more like ive enablement than anything politically enticing.

Premo has described this documentary as his attempt to explore how homegrown political violence is justified by those who partake in it. To examine this topic, Premo follows the lives of three men – Chris, Thad and Randy. All three are avid Trump ers with ties to the Proud Boys, a far-right militant group. They are advocating for Trump’s reelection in the 2020 Presidential Election through rallies and caravans, loudly mocking antifa and liberals at every opportunity. However, when Trump loses the 2020 Election (and yes he definitely lost), their struggle to make peace with this leads to violence and tragedy.

Chris, Thad and Randy’s stories are intertwined through the editing, their views and experiences acting as parallels and foils to one another. Premo films them without interference, giving each man the space to make their voices, and Olympic-level mental gymnastics, heard. This allows Premo to capture how political indoctrination destroys one’s personal life. Chris is first seen building a nursery for his soon-to-be-born son and he is clearly a talented carpenter. But his devotion to Trump has become so all-consuming that he has all but abandoned his wife and child, spending more time collecting guns and modifying his truck to “own the libs” than hearing out his wife’s pleas for normalcy. In his mind, Chris is doing what he’s doing for his family, but the contradictory nonsense of his words are on full display here.

Thad is comfortably the most interesting, and sane, of the men. A proud military veteran, Thad confesses to being radicalised against the government by Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. How he went from that film’s famously leftist views to the authoritarianism of Trumpism is sadly never explored, but, unlike his two counterparts, Thad shows some self-awareness. He spends much of the film working with the Black Lives Matter movement, advocating for free speech and finding his views challenged by BLM activist Jacarri Kelley. He’s more open-minded, and thus far more compelling, than the other men, who only become increasingly mental as they attempt to nurse the ego of a narcissist-in-chief who wouldn’t be seen dead in their company.

In filming these men’s lives objectively, always with distance between spectacle and spectator, Premo does capture an ominous undercurrent as the threats of violence grow in authenticity. Yet this choice is also its achille’s heel. The documentary never talks one-to-one with its three men beyond the odd question, preferring to let their own words provide their proverbial hanging rope. But, aside from maybe Thad, we don’t get a sense of who they are as people without Trumpism. Their backstories are only briefly explored if at all, and other than a vague feeling of disillusionment their reasonings for being such ardent Trump fans are not examined. This feels like a missed opportunity to reinforce the core thesis on how quickly political indoctrination can be normalised. The three men feel more like oddities to gawk at than real people who have drunk terrifying amounts of fascist Kool-Aid.

Homegrown eventually culminates in footage of the January 6 insurrection, in which Trump ers stormed the US Capitol Building and attempted to murder politicians to appease their loser President. It’s still shocking to see such deplorable conduct based on an obvious lie, especially when Chris declares himself a police er mere hours after participating in the insurrection. Sadly, because the insurrection is framed as an inevitability rather than the shocking escalation of domestic terrorism that it was, its inclusion feels hollow, particularly when the bulk of the film is shot at social gatherings and rallies that are distinctly separate from the wider political fear-mongering. It feels like the film is restraining its own views unnecessarily.

There’s an interesting concept behind Homegrown, but the film never quite comes together. Had it challenged its three subject matters’ viewpoints and refusal to take responsibility more, then its otherwise noble themes could have had much more impact. Yet it feels more like a brief, albeit cinematic, glance into delusion rather than an indictment on the increasing normalisation of political violence and contemporary fascism. In light of Trump’s chilling return to power, its sense of a story half-told only hits harder.