I’ve never seen a documentary about Girl Scout Cookies before, so I went into Alysa Nahmias’s “Cookie Queens” figuring that it might include, among other things, a tantalizing history of this beloved American institution — a rundown of the nine current varieties of Girl Scout Cookie (my favorite: Samoas, obvi! With Tagalongs a close second), a survey of some of the dozens of discontinued flavors (Rasberry Rallies, we hardly knew ye), and — more to the point — a look at how Girl Scout Cookies came to be, how the Girl Scout Cookie season developed into a wholesome Middle American pastime, and what Girl Scout Cookies have meant, through the decades, to those of us who hungrily consume them and to all the girls who’ve devoted themselves to selling boxes of them.
But no! “Cookie Queens” includes none of that stuff. The movie unfolds entirely in the present and never gives you even a fleeting sense of the past, of how Girl Scout Cookies rose in prominence to become the phenomenon they are today. (In case you’re wondering, they were launched in World War I to raise money for U.S. soldiers.) The opening credits, set to the Julie Ruin’s “Cookie Road,” which sounds like a great lost track from the B-52’s, play over black-and-white photographs and old film footage of Girl Scouts from bygone eras. But once the credits are over, the movie gets down to its single-minded theme and obsession: how Girl Scout Cookies, once a quaint piece of Americana, have lurched into their late-capitalist phase, with the girls who sell them vying to become champions by fashioning themselves into 12-year-old entrepreneurial go-getters.
