Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring’ on Max, Another Documentary Digging Digging Through The Infamous Celeb-Burglary Case

The Bling Ring saga gets reiterated again with The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring (now streaming on Max), a documentary from prolific director and producer Erin Lee Carr. If you’re not familiar with this story about a string high-profile celebrity burglaries committed primarily by teenagers then you obviously didn’t catch the plethora of news stories in 2009, and haven’t seen 2011 Lifetime movie The Bling Ring, or Sofia Coppola’s 2013 film The Bling Ring, or 2022’s Netflix doc series The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist. So why is Carr bothering to revisit this well-trod subject? Well, she managed to talk alleged Bling Ring ringleader Rachel Lee into speaking publicly for the first time. Now let’s see if Lee has anything new or compelling to add to this story.

THE RINGLEADER: THE CASE OF THE BLING RING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: UNRELIABLE NARRATOR ALERT: Let it be known that our director catches Lee in a lie, on camera. And gets her to admit that she still “unconsciously” lies. And even presents her subject from a different camera angle when Carr believes Lee is lying (hint: it inverts the image of Lee). So The Ringleader is ultimately not about what Lee says but how she says it, the context and the subtextual ramifications. Maybe that’s true for every documentary, but it’s especially true in this case, so consider yourself warned.

One more thing – I’m not sure how much we should sympathize with Lee beyond the fundamental optimism we should all possess, that people who do bad things can eventually better themselves. She seems to have done that in the opening minutes of the film, which quietly show her arranging stones and crystals in the workspace where she cuts and styles hair. Leetells her story to Carr, whose voice we occasionally hear from off-camera. The goal here is to see where, and if, Lee’s story jibes with the popular narrative of celeb- and fame-obsessed teenagers who broke into the homes of Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, Paris Hilton and others, stealing millions of dollars of jewelry, clothing and other valuables. Unlike many of her cohorts, Lee didn’t soak up the notoriety of being part of the Bling Ring, instead choosing to keep quiet during legal proceedings and in the many years since (notably at the behest of her lawyer mother). And so Carr frames her as an “enigma” who’s finally, well, I don’t want to say “coming clean,” because Lee’s credibility is absolutely in question, but she’s speaking out after years of silence.

So here’s Lee’s moment, I guess. She talks about how she grew up in Calabasas, a Los Angeles suburb that’s officially America’s richest city in per capita income. Unlike many of her peers, Lee was middle class. Also unlike many of her peers, she isn’t White; her father, David Lee, interviewed here, is Korean, and is a fascinating person, a professional gambler who sheltered his daughter in Las Vegas after security camera footage of his daughter’s break-ins hit the news, making him an accessory to her crimes. But I’m getting ahead of things here. Lee talks about the rush she got when she stole a bill from a stack of $100s in her mom’s briefcase – she’d never notice it, Lee remembers thinking. She says her “struggles with FOMO” led her to steal a classmate’s Ugg boots, which got her expelled and sent to an alternative school, rendering her even more of an outcast. There, she met Nick Prugo, who was gay and therefore also an outsider. They became best friends, a dynamic duo who eventually started the Bling Ring, and then you can’t help but come to the conclusion that punitive expulsion might not be a good way to deal with a teenager who’s making poor choices. 

Talking heads – pretty much the usual crime-doc roundup of journalists and attorneys – provide some context: This was the late 2000s. Our TVs were clogged with reality shows starring famous-for-being-famous celebs like Hilton and the Kardashians. Lee’s interest in (obsession with?) those shows and idolizing the thieving protagonists of movies like The Fast and the Furious and Ocean’s 11 had something to do with her and Prugo’s decision to start burgling unlocked cars, then targeting celebs’ homes by finding their addresses online, and checking their social media accounts to see when they’d be gone. She started taking Xanax, which she says made her not feel any emotions, therefore enabling her bad behavior. Eventually, more friends got involved with the burglaries, and eventually, they got busted. Now, Lee says she stopped using Xanax and flushed her pills down the toilet. “I think I honestly was a sociopath,” she says in retrospect, although her use of the word “honestly” feels like a red flag.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Carr’s filmography is full of docs with sensationalist subject matter, Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop and Britney vs. Spears among them. Her most incisive and thoughtful is another story of a troubled teenage friendship, the rich and enlightening HBO two-parter I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter.

Performance Worth Watching: David Lee is the most refreshing voice in the film; he comes off refreshingly honest and unvarnished.  

Memorable Dialogue: David Lee explains why he left his children in California when he relocated to Vegas: “I thought they could be raised in a better environment in Calabasas. The record shows, it was not.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: For Lee, it wasn’t about the fame, and it wasn’t about the goods. It was about the rush – and taking that admission a step further, it seems to have been about the compulsion that she still may not have control over. Lee goes so far as to say she has a tendency to “lie accidentally and unconsciously,” which might be the most truthful and self-aware thing she says in The Ringleader. Carr doesn’t switch to her inverted camera angle too often, which tells us she frequently believes Lee is being truthful, although those of us further removed from the scene – Lee sitting on the floor cross-legged, wearing all white, like a new-age wackjob who’s about to astrologize our chakras or whatever – might smell a little more BS. 

But Carr’s framing and presentation of her subject does underscore the notion that being in the presence of someone who’s famous – or infamous – endears them to someone more than the relative objectivity of watching them on TV. That plays into the sense that celebrities shouldn’t care if their stuff gets stolen, since they already have so much of it, when in reality, their eroded sense of security and the feeling of violation can be traumatic to anyone, regardless of wealth. Carr touches on that idea tangentially, before getting back to Lee’s point-of-view, where she laments how her friendship with Prugo fell apart as he ate up the attention in the wake of their arrest – she insists they were 50/50 codependent partners in leading the Bling Ring – and accepts culpability for her past actions, and we might believe some what she says, maybe, because her commentary sometimes seems to be to unvarnished to be totally dishonest.

I’m torn between feeling frustrated and fascinated with The Ringleader. On one hand, it’s somewhat repetitive in its reportage – it cues up ridiculous footage of Bling Ringer Alexis Neiers on her short-lived reality show Pretty Wild – and offers a blurry portrait of Lee, who admittedly might be too slippery to fully grasp. (The most compelling footage here is a relatively candid, far-too-brief clip of Lee and her father working through some shit on-screen.) On the other, her story brims with implications about the dubious nature of fame – note how the spotlight has since faded on Bloom, Lohan, Megan Fox and the other robbery victims – and how people present themselves in front of a camera. Carr’s use of significant amounts of personal home-video footage of Lee tells us that Lee is likely used to being on-camera, so interviews for this documentary don’t seem to be outside her comfort zone, all the more reason not to fully trust everything we see in this doc.

Our Call: The Ringleader is engaging despite being borderline repetitive and irrelevant. If you have yet to consume all the other Bling Ring fodder out there, it might be a good place to start, so I say STREAM IT.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.