Reviewed by: As Goes Janesville dir. by Brad Lichtenstein Jesse Gant As Goes Janesville, dir. Brad Lichtenstein, 2012. As Goes Janesville (2012) is a documentary film that examines the closing of a Janesville, Wisconsin, General Motors (gm) assembly and its aftermath in the period between December 2008 and the summer of 2012. The film’s title presents a spin on the longstanding tendency of area boosters to label Janesville as a model, representative, or otherwise just plain-old exceptional American city. A particularly notable example of this tendency—which is not unique to Janesville, of course—occurred in February 2008, just months before the final car rolled off the plant’s assembly line at the end of the year. Fresh from a speech and visit the night before in nearby Madison, then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke to an assembled crowd at the Janesville plant. Obama noted, “Through hard times and good, great challenge and great change, the promise of Janesville has been the promise of America.”1 As goes Janesville, in other words, so goes America. This turns out to be a misleading title for the film, however, since As Goes Janesville is resolutely interested in the personal and individualized struggles of Janesville’s residents during the early months and years of the 2008 economic crisis. An early scene from As Goes Janesville (perhaps unintentionally) borrows a trick from Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which famously chronicled community reactions to the closings of several gm plants in Flint, Michigan, during the 1980s. Just like the archival footage assembled in Roger and Me to show the last car moving across the Flint assembly line, an early scene from As Goes Janesville uses similar footage capturing the very moment the Janesville plant’s last car moved across its assembly line on December 23, 2008. By the plant’s official closing date of April 23, 2009, thousands of unionized and otherwise good-paying jobs [End Page 185] were simply eliminated or shipped elsewhere, and the Janesville plant that had been in near-continual operation since 1919 at last shuttered its doors. Producer/director Brad Lichtenstein structures As Goes Janesville around several relatable figures whose experiences highlight the struggles of job seekers today, particularly those navigating unemployment and seeking new training. Lichtenstein and his team follow several of the community’s residents from the economic crash of 2008 to the spring and summer of 2012, a period during which Janesville’s plant became one of thirty-nine nationally to close its doors. By itself, the factory had employed more than seven thousand people at the peak of its operations, but the closing cost to the city totaled an estimated eleven thousand local jobs lost overall. Throughout this time, Janesville’s population hovered at around fifty to sixty thousand residents, meaning that the job losses severely impacted the community. As Goes Janesville is much more successful when it documents the particular everyday struggles of those left behind by the plant’s demise and sets aside questions about the city’s regional or national meaning, as implied by the film’s title. The documentary’s central storylines, then, are at their most compelling when they examine a narrower but nonetheless important set of questions about the ways in which individual residents grappled with the loss of this important economic and community cornerstone between the time of the plant’s closing in 2008–9 and the time of the film’s release in 2012. Several individual stories stand out, each highlighting the values of hard work and perseverance that will immediately feel familiar to anyone knowledgeable about the labor history of the Midwest. As Goes Janesville situates Janesville’s race relations along a decidedly black and white trajectory, despite significant and fairly recent influxes of Mexican and Asian (especially Hmong) immigrants to the city over the past several decades. Though the film might have done much more to draw out the community’s racial and ethnic makeup, Lichtenstein does some work to provide an opportunity to view these transformations from a variety of positions. For example, Angie Hodges and Gayle Listenbee emerge as the film’s two most prominent African American voices...