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. And then Covid-19 laid bare a structural hollowness in the U.S. economy that few realized had gotten so bad.

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.

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.

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.

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, and racial and economic inequality — and we look at what an unsettled future could hold for them.

In their stories, the brokenness of the system is evident. Half-trillion-dollar companies pay no U.S. taxes. The 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.

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 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.

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.