‘Sugar Babies’ Review: A Louisiana TikToker Hopes to Flirt Her Way Out of Poverty in a Surface-Level Portrait

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic The flighty mindset of hyper-online living proves an uneasy solution to the rough gravity check of small-town poverty in “Sugar Babies,” Rachel Fleit‘s documentary portrait of young, hard-up Louisiana women getting by on their wits, wiles and heavily TikTok-filtered faces.

A working-class college student in her early twenties with dreams to chase and fees to pay, Autumn Johnson refers to herself as “a sugar baby without the sugar”: Trawling dating sites and social media platforms for moneyed men seeking some virtual flirtation, she plies them for money in exchange for texts and photos, all without ever meeting in person.

It’s a living, or at least it seems to be. Beguiled by Autumn’s force of personality, Fleit’s film zeroes in on her and her genial circle, but is sketchier on the social and financial realities of the phenomenon for which it is titled.

Pitched uncertainly between intimate nonfiction character study and a longer journalistic view, “Sugar Babies” is understandably compelled by Autumn as a human subject.