There’s no time like the present, and time heals all wounds (a stretch, but we’ll go with it), but time waits for no one — not even the bro-heavy, bitcoin-crazed, anti-government crowd that put the annual festival gathering known as Anarchapulco on the map. And not just the map of Mexico.
For six years, beginning in 2015, documentary filmmaker Todd Schramke followed the alternately liberating and scary fortunes of several key players in the Anarchapulco community, many of whom settled in Acapulco. The result is the six-part documentary series “The Anarchists.” The individual storylines offered Schramke and his colleagues a potentially gripping and increasingly chilling array of complications involving drugs, debauchery, warring mission statements, suicide and murder, the last likely committed by a drug cartel.
I say “potentially” because HBO’s series proceeds with a frustrating lack of selectivity and focus, as if the whole project had gotten too much sun. There are fascinating subjects here, especially Lily Forester, a heartbreaking and mordantly witty presence throughout. She and her partner known as John Galton — like several Anarchapulco devotees, Galton’s name adopts a variation on the name of the libertarian superman John Galt of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — have fled the U.S. and their former lives for the promise of a freer existence among their fellow seekers.
