Boys and young men are struggling. It’s time to talk about it.
That’s the premise of the new documentary Gone Guys, which was released this past summer by Well Told Films, the Vermont Community Foundation, and the Richard E. & Deborah L. Tarrant Foundation. Producer Lauren Appel Curry ’97 is the Tarrant Foundation’s executive director.
The film, which recently won the award for Best Documentary Film at the 2025 Vermont Film Festival and was featured at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Film Festival, is set in rural Vermont. Throughout its 45-minute run time, it explores what it calls the “quiet crisis” taking place in Vermont and all around the country: the increasing isolation and disengagement of boys and young men. The film reveals, both through personal, local stories and with national data, the downward trajectory of an entire generation. Boys and young men are increasingly failing academically, struggling with loneliness, suffering from substance use disorder, and dying by suicide.
Curry came to the Tarrant Foundation after graduating from Middlebury with a degree in political science and working seven years at a community foundation in Wyoming. There, she says, she “had the chance to see how philanthropy can address complex issues holistically.” Returning to Vermont with her husband, fellow Middlebury alum David Curry ’96, she became the director of the foundation in 2005 when it was launched by Vermont businessman Rich Tarrant and his wife, Deborah. Over the years, the Tarrant Foundation has funded both community grants and larger strategic initiatives, including a 15-year, $12 million investment in Vermont’s K–12 education system.
This film, Curry says, was Rich Tarrant’s decision to take “one last big swing” (Tarrant died this past August). “Boys’ struggles in school had been on his mind since my job interview 20 years ago,” Curry says. “The data was showing worrying trends: declining male college enrollment, workforce drop-offs, and higher substance use, incarceration, and suicide rates.”
These trends had been noticed by others, most prominently author Richard V. Reeves. “Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men was pivotal in informing our decision to make a film. The book frames the issue not as either/or—whether we help boys or support girls through their very real struggles—but as something society can address while still supporting girls and women.” The foundation brought Reeves to Vermont for some very well-attended and meaningful public talks that shone a light on how much the conversation needed to be happening. “We realized we needed something bigger and more lasting. That’s when we decided to make a film.”
The subject matter of Gone Guys is sobering. At a recent screening of the film in Burlington, Vermont, the theater was filled with concerned-faced parents, educators, and community leaders, and a smattering of young men, some of whom had been featured in the film. As the audience watched cleverly animated statistics of alarming data—how the suicide rate among young men has increased by one-third in the last 10 years, that men make up 64 percent of those high school students whose GPAs are in the bottom 10 percent, that labor force participation of young men has decreased approximately 8 percent since 1960—an uncomfortable stillness settled in across the theater.
But the film was also beautiful, with sweeping shots of Vermont in late fall, of farms and rural schools and woods and fields. There were honest, touching, and ultimately hopeful stories of young men, educators, mentors, and researchers who are finding ways to change the story at the very local level, from Boy Scout troops to experiential learning and afterschool groups where boys can talk about how it feels to be a boy in 2025 and be vulnerable without fear.
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