All That Is Sacred

The scouts

It's a literary hagiography dressed up as documentary—exactly the kind of reverent, consensus-building navel-gazing that makes me want to look away, except Ballew's actually doing something weirder with the form than the premise lets on, and I can't quite shake it.

A film acutely aware of its place in the essay tradition—the way it threads four literary voices into a meditation on place, ambition, and the specific fever of 1970s Key West shows formal intelligence and a curator's understanding of how to layer archive, voice, and image into something that argues itself into being.

The decision to let silence and water-sound carry as much narrative weight as the voices—to trust that absence and peripheral detail matter more than chronology or explanation—is what separates this from a standard literary biography and makes it breathe.