About the Film | Out Of Reach
Why Has Life Gotten So Hard?
For generations, the “American Dream” was an implicit promise: work hard, play by the rules, and you could build a better life for your family. But for the first time in the nation’s history, that dream feels out of reach for millions. The post-war economic boom that built a thriving middle class collapsed under the weight of trickle-down economics, deregulation, and the offshoring of tens of thousands of jobs.
Out of Reach: The Struggle for the American Dream is a feature-length documentary that provides a deeply personal account of this collapse. Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a city that represents an extreme microcosm of America’s industrial decline—the film explores what has changed over four decades by examining wages, healthcare, home ownership, and retirement.
Out of Reach: The Struggle for the American Dream is a feature-length documentary that provides a deeply personal account of this collapse. Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a city that represents an extreme microcosm of America’s industrial decline—the film explores what has changed over four decades by examining wages, healthcare, home ownership, and retirement.
Stronger Together
The Story of Master Lock: A Symbol of Change
At the heart of our story is Master Lock, long a bastion of manufacturing in Milwaukee. The company was the workplace for several of our characters, who were lifted up and ultimately let down by its turbulent history. After moving jobs to China and Mexico, the company announced in 2023 that it would shutter its last Milwaukee plant, showing that the nation’s industrial slide continues.
A Story for All Americans. Unfiltered. To explore the lives in America's industrial decline.
Through the unfiltered voices of its characters—Black, white, Latino, conservative, and progressive—the film reveals a broken system where a full-time job no longer guarantees stability. Yet, in their stories of resilience, entrepreneurship, and political action, the aspiration for a better America is alive and well.
Out of Reach is a film for anyone who wants to understand why their social safety net has vanished and how we might begin to rebuild it.
For the first time in America’s 244-year history, the dream of a better, rich, fuller life for all – the so-called American Dream – seems out of reach for many people, regardless of color, creed or politics. The post-war economic boom collapsed in the 1980s under the weight of trickle-down economics, deregulation and privatization, offshoring of jobs and a shift in the importance of shareholder value over the value of labor. And then, Covid-19 laid bare a structural hollowness in the U.S. economy that few realized had gotten so bad.
244 years
Crumbling Dreams
The true American Dream out of reach for many
COVID-19
Structures Collapsed
Support systems gones; deregulation and privatization has a stranglehold of America
About the Film | Out Of Reach
Why Are There So Many Stories?
Out of Reach: The Struggle for the American Dream is an account of this collapse and a probing look at what lies ahead though the stories of hardworking Americans from different backgrounds, races and party affiliations in Milwaukee, WI. We go up close and personal, taking a deep dive into their daily lives. We focus on their travails and victories in their quest to succeed in a country riven by partisan politics, pandemic, racial and economic inequality and look at what an unsettled future could hold for them.
Solutions are less obvious, but, as the aspiration in the hearts of our characters shows, the dream has not died of making the United States of America a place where the rewards for hard work and discipline are a longer, safer and healthier life, workers’ rights and protections, home ownership and entry into the coveted middle class for people of all races and nations.
In their stories, the brokenness of the system is evident. Half-trillion-dollar companies pay no U.S. taxes. The U.S.’s for-profit healthcare system is often an unaffordable luxury and remains strangely tied to our employment. A fragmented educational system turns out high school graduates not qualified to do anything but go into debt for expensive tertiary or vocational education or risk becoming a permanent underclass. Heads of family are expected to support a family on a full-time $15-an-hour job with minimal benefits.
Meet our team
Our team
We’re 120+ individuals united by innovative ideas
Julia Robinson
Campaign Manager
Michael Carter
Communications Director
David Thompson
Policy Advisor
Sophia Lee
Field Organizer