The flighty mindset of hyper-online living proves an uneasy solution to the rough gravity check of small-town poverty in “Sugar Babies,” Rachel Fleit‘s documentary portrait of young, hard-up Louisiana women getting by on their wits, wiles and heavily TikTok-filtered faces. A working-class college student in her early twenties with dreams to chase and fees to pay, Autumn Johnson refers to herself as “a sugar baby without the sugar”: Trawling dating sites and social media platforms for moneyed men seeking some virtual flirtation, she plies them for money in exchange for texts and photos, all without ever meeting in person. It’s a living, or at least it seems to be.
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