“Where shall we look for Washington, the greatest among men,” asked Parson Weems in 1800, “but in America—that greatest Continent, which, rising from beneath the frozen pole, stretches far and wide to the south?” Weems, Washington’s first biographer, was a propagandist of genius—but even he might not have known quite how American he was being when he wrote that line. A smaller country, it is implied—geographically smaller, and smaller in soul—simply could not have handled the monster-truck greatness of this man. It would have ruptured or burst. For greatness like this, only America would have been big enough.
Weems’s Washington is famously great all the way through, great from the get-go: an angelic child, fanned by the warm wings of “ministering spirits,” who matures irreversibly into a mighty warrior and then a world-shaking leader. But what if greatness is something you grow into, patchily and vexedly, under pressure? Young Washington, a new biopic, gives us pre-Revolutionary George, early-20s George, pale, petulant, virginal, ramrod-straight, and bristling with awkwardness and ambition. He is callow, unformed. Imperfect, in a word. And when he starts soldiering, he makes some rather large mistakes.
[Read: George Washington, man of mystery]
As played by the very beautiful (and curiously English) William Franklyn-Miller, this Washington is an underdog. He’s an interloper, an uppity tenant farmer seeking to make a name for himself in service of the Crown. He goes on surveying missions and nearly freezes to death. Unembraced by Virginian high society, he crashes a party at the mansion of Lord Fairfax, entering via the basement. (It’s here that he meets Sally Cary, soon to marry into the Fairfax family, and begins a stilted flirtation with her.) Across the Appalachians, in the murk of the Ohio wilderness, is the developing fault line between two contending empires: the British and the French. Who will claim this endless, uncertain landscape? Having trekked the territory with his trusty surveyor’s compass, and in the absence of anyone else rash enough to do it, Washington volunteers to deliver an ultimatum to the encroaching French forces. At the head of a rabble of Virginian militiamen, in the name of the King of England, he’ll tell those Frenchmen to clear off.
The Ohio Valley, the “immeasurable forest, from time immemorial the gloomy haunt of ravening beasts” (Weems again), becomes the young man’s proving ground. And his flaws—pride, inexperience—are consequential. Does newly promoted Major Washington, by blundering with his men into a party of breakfasting French soldiers, whom they sort of massacre in uncontrolled volleys of buckshot, accidentally start the French and Indian War, which becomes the Seven Years’ War, called by some historians “the first world war”? It certainly seems like he does. And does he then build a fort—Fort Necessity—in the wrong place, exposing it to floods and ambuscades, and eventually getting some of his men killed in its unsuccessful defense? Again, it would appear so. Returning home, hot with shame, Washington attempts to resign his commission: The lieutenant governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, played with birdlike severity by Ben Kingsley, will not hear of it. Months later he presents himself to General Edward Braddock, humbly but determinedly offering his experience in this new style of warfare. “You lost!” the general (Andy Serkis) reminds him. “Failure is a great teacher,” Washington says. (If I tell you that this is one of those movies where everybody speaks in slightly leaden proverbs—“Obedience can be commanded. Respect must be earned,” “Even a pawn can take a king,” and so on—you’ll immediately apprehend the ambience of Young Washington.)
[From the November 2025 issue: Caity Weaver on what it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor]
And this, of course, is the lesson of the movie: These poor decisions, these disasters, are a necessary prelude to greatness. Without flawed and gangling young George blowing it in the Ohio woods, there’s no full-grown George, the emphatic figure who shows up in Philadelphia at the Second Continental Congress and is speedily and unanimously proclaimed chief commander of the Revolutionary forces. Everyone and everything—society, reality, good stuff and bad stuff—is fiercely tutoring our hero, fiercely engaged in his development.
Peter Stark, in his (excellent) 2018 biography, also called Young Washington, highlights the archetypal elements in this story, the screenplay-friendly substructure of this “transition from adolescence to adulthood.” “Washington’s passage,” he writes, “parallels what in mythology Joseph Campbell calls the ‘hero’s journey.’ ” We might even call it a shamanic voyage. Young George goes out into the badlands: His weakness is exposed; he is torn at by the demons of fear, failure, and defeat; his body is tested and his ego picked apart. He returns loaded with strange knowledge and as-if-magical attainments. Into the direst of circumstances men will now follow him. In battle he is inviolate: Musket balls and flying death-shards seem to swerve around him. And when the showdown comes—against the Brits, against power, against the chaos of an emergent nation—like Eminem in 8 Mile, he is ready.
So there’s a wild and potentially somewhat Jungian movie to be made here. I can imagine a version of Young Washington directed by one of the Safdie brothers, with a score by Hildur Guðnadóttir. It’s a great movie, this one I’m imagining: It has an entirely made-up scene where Washington, mid-parley with the Iroquois, hallucinates that he is being attacked by ravens—great, big, jabbering, inky ravens with walloping wings and talons that draw blood. The dark cellos of Guðnadóttir chop and grind, and Washington—shrieking, swiping, maddened at the air—flees into the forest, a disappearing uniform. Observes an Iroquois matriarch: “That one has far to go.”
[Peter Wehner: Jesus of the small screen]
But Young Washington comes to us by way of Angel Studios, “a home,” as CEO Neal Harmon puts it in the studio’s mission statement, or north-star letter, “for stories that amplify light.” So far these stories have included the life-of-Christ TV drama The Chosen and—more controversially—Sound of Freedom, inspired by the activities of the anti-sex-trafficking activist Tim Ballard and celebrated by Trump backers, religious conservatives, and QAnon believers. Young Washington is not crude and ghastly like Sound of Freedom. It has some decent big-name actors—Kingsley, Serkis, Mary-Louise Parker—some stirring battles, some history lessons, and the most ideological thing about it is its soundtrack, which is a kind of string-based moralistic soup. But the process of light-amplification has straitened the storytelling. Clichés and hoary tropes abound. “Most shows offered these days,” Angel Studios’ north-star letter continues, “add to the cynicism, division, and darkness so pervasive in society. Fortunately, darkness and light, hope and despair, cannot exist in the same place at the same time.” I disagree. And so does William Blake: “Joy & Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine.” Hope and despair are twins, inextricable. And a darker, weirder Washington would have made for a better movie.
In one respect, though, Young Washington nails it. As he makes his error-strewn progress through early manhood, Washington is variously fobbed off by supercilious Brits, sneered at by drippingly Gallic Frenchmen, and insulted by the Virginian elite. Class-wise, money-wise, the system is rigged against him. Can he not break through on his own merits? “That is not the way the world works!” his exasperated half brother Lawrence tells him. “Then someone should remake it!” storms young George, cosmically mutinous.
America, America, I can see you being born right here, as this strain of noble insurgency mingles with the beginnings of your biggest personality defect: the Great American Inferiority Complex. You think you’re better than me?! Nearly everyone in Young Washington thinks they’re better than George Washington. And he’ll show them all, the bastards. Planted alongside the seed of liberty, in other words, is the seed of grievance—of the political ressentiment from which we are still suffering. Now that’s an origin story.
This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Boy George.”