Mid90s

★★½

Opening Friday, Oct. 26

You don’t need to be into skateboarding to catch nostalgic feelings from Mid90s, beloved old-millennial Jonah Hill’s paean to SoCal skate culture at the end of the twentieth century. You just need to be at least pushing thirty. Hill plasters his directorial debut with images of Guile from Street Fighter II and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ren and Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead, Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep.

That’s the first five minutes. But there are still eighty to go. In their course, cameras linger adoringly on nineties Doritos bags and CD jewel cases no doubt amassed through mail-order clearing-house clubs; the words “Blockbuster night” are uttered. And nineties skating is just as lovingly glossed: The puffy shoes and knit beanies are all in place, and skate brands like Girl, Alien Workshop, and Chocolate wantonly mix with preppy gear by Polo, Hilfiger, and Nautica.

Too bad this surface verisimilitude doesn’t go all the way down. Mid90s has charming moments and hits all the beats of coming of age while learning to skate. But Hill, working from his own script and drawing from his youth, seems to overshoot his nostalgia, slinging it back through the nihilistic nineties and into the innocent eighties—the era of Stevie’s first department-store board, with its bitchin’ neon-colored graphic, fat bubble tail, and plastic rails. It’s a rose-tinted take on a complex culture, and the film, though enjoyable enough, starts rolling away as soon as you leave the theater.

Stevie, a thirteen-year-old with a vaguely “troubled home life”—his brother’s a mess sometimes, his mom seems fine—levels up from angel-baby to grom to skate rat over one LA summer. Besides puberty, the engine of his transformation is a crew he joins at the aptly named Motor Avenue skate shop, which appears to be run entirely by children. Motor Avenue is fictional touch in a film obsessed with real brands, with one other, more curious exception: No pro skater is ever mentioned. It’s inconceivable that these kids would sit around the shop bullshitting and leafing through Big Brother magazine all day without bringing up Chad Muska or Ed Templeton.

Mid90s is best as a narrow but heartfelt chronicle of overcoming the physical and social challenges of skating, extending your capacities with joy and terror. The bewildered smile Stevie wears for much of the film applies equally to his first push and his first ollie, his first smoke and his first beer, his first hookup and his first fistfight. He glides effortlessly through the rites of passage and mercurial hierarchies of skating, undergoing suspiciously mild ragging for such a little kook. The truest moment comes when he attempts a roof-gap trick he has no hope of making after someone else chickens out, instantly shifting the pecking order. 

But the plotting is thin and schematic, leaving little room for grace notes in its low-stakes momentum, and while the actors are delightful, the characters are under-sketched in some ways and overstated in others. Stevie (Sunny Suljic) isn’t layered, he’s positively split—this sweet child with a mildly problematic home life and good friends who will suddenly start strangling himself with a Super Nintendo controller cord, as if having flashbacks of being in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Pack leader Ray (charmer Na-kel Smith, a real-life pro) sometimes seems to have wandered in from an ABC after-school special, so nurturing and motivational are his pep talks. Fuckshit (that’s what he says when someone makes a heavy trick), a slacker played by the luminous Olan Prenatt, is calibrated to be Ray’s foil more than his own person. Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin) has no POV; he hovers on the periphery signaling sadness and poverty. And while Lucas Hedges is watchable as always, his character, Stevie’s older brother, is a bizarre creation who alternates between beating Stevie up and weeping when Stevie hurts his feelings. 

Some of Mid90s’ limitations chalk up to overcautious first-time filmmaking, though we get glorious cinematography of LA light and an expensive soundtrack of nineties rap, punk, and indie to compensate. The airless script could have used more space for improvisation, more lulls in the narrative, so the characters could grow into more than avatars of their types, and the minutiae of skating could shine through. There’s a great sequence where Ray sets up a new deck for Stevie, razoring off the grip tape and screwing in the trucks, but this is the exception to the rule in a movie where skating is more emotional texture than material fact.

The faint ersatz quality haunting Mid90s’ period accuracy is starkest in a scene where the posse encounters a homeless man in a park full of other skaters, and they all sit down to wax rhapsodic about skating. This is hard to square with the more accurate, if carefully hedged in basic decency, portrayal of nineties skate kids elsewhere, with their commonplace misogyny, aggression, and homophobia—all well-documented in Big Brother, the culturally rich but absolutely vile nineties skate bible. Honestly, those kids would have been just as likely to shit in the homeless man’s hat.

The nineties introduced a pronounced dirtbag strain to skate culture that culminated, by 2000, in Jackass. It was an era when skate mags and videos were full of angry young men falling off roofs in shopping carts and playing horrible pranks on each other. This wasn’t universal, but in clearly alluding to it while also downplaying it, Hill shies away from having to criticize it and explore its sociological sources.

There’s another area where he doesn’t want to go: You don’t need to be into skateboarding to catch nostalgic feelings from Mid90s, but you might need to be a man. Women’s subjectivity is completely absent, which might be as era-appropriate as the casual use of “faggot” but is just as off-putting today. The film resembles a fake version of sublime skate doc Minding the Gap, which both validates its essential truth and highlights its cagey artifice. Mid90s just outlines the same home traumas that create skate tribes that Minding the Gap fills in so deeply. Watch that for a genuine glimpse of skating now. As for the nineties, sadly, Larry Clark’s Kids still feels like the more piercing, authentic fictional film of record.