Sundance 2022: Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, Framing Agnes, TikTok, Boom. | Festivals & Awards

One of the more straightforward titles from this year’s US Documentary Competition is “TikTok, Boom.,” a profile piece on the incredibly popular social media app. TikTok reigns on millions of phones and over attention spans across the world, and yet there hasn’t been a documentary of this size about it until now. Directed by Shalini Kantayya, of the highly recommended 2020 doc “Coded Bias,” this film remarks about the who, what, why, when, and how behind the vertical video app’s success, and traces its history and Chinese background. There are passages of interest in this documentary, including when it takes a stance that is more about challenging TikTok than being in awe of it. But one can’t help feel this is geared more toward outsiders than those who are already caught up in its attention beam and feeding into its algorithms. 

“TikTok, Boom.” has an impressive scope with its journalism—there are a massive amount of TikToks included in the editing, and Kantayya introduces us to many users who have much to share about their experience. For one, it succeeds at putting a face and a TikTok relationship behind some of its stars, like Spencer X, who has become a professional beatboxer thanks to the app, or activist Feroza Aziz, who has learned the limits to which the Chinese-owned app will let her talk about human rights issues before taking it down. These stories, among others, repeat the idea of how the internet can make people famous, that it can give them a presence larger than previously possible. Though this is part of the TikTok experience, it also is unremarkable in the general scheme of internet celebrity, or of its inherent dangers. 

The film’s curiosity about TikTok is more interesting in the second half when it digs into the ugly controversies, when it analyzes the more problematic parts of the app that have also popped into the news. It goes into how the Black Lives Matter movement was left with a broken hashtag during the protests of June 2020, or how journalists discovered that it has a way of weeding out people that it considers ugly. It’s alarming stuff and the documentary handles these pieces of accountability well; some of its analysis about the importance of TikTok’s outreach is compelling too. But its structure and general insight feels more like scrolling through a newsfeed than it should.