Skateboards, Hip-Hop and S**t: Growing Up "Mid90s"

Mid90s
written and directed by Jonah Hill
starring Sunny Suljic, Kate Waterston, Lucan Hedges, Na-Kel Smith, Olan Pranatt and others

Recommended? With reservations.

I wandered into Mid90s out of sheer curiosity. This coming-of-age tale was written and directed by Oscar nominee Jonah Hill, the onetime chubby comic relief in a number of comedies like SuperBad, Get Him To the Greek, This Is The End and Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- movies that I lowkey enjoyed -- who has since repositioned himself as a serious actor in Moneyball, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Netflix stumper Maniac with a sleeker physique. Mid90s is his attempt at a cinema bildungsroman, but while he's wrangled some strong performances out of his young actors, the results are mixed.

Shot almost documentary style, Mid90s centers on diminutive 13-year-old Stevie (an astonishing Sunny Suljic), a middle schooler growing up in LA with a single mother (Katherine Waterston) and an emotionally stunted older brother (Lucas Hedges) who frequently beats and abuses him. Desperate to come out from under his brother's thumb, while simultaneously studying everything bout him, and grow up fast, Stevie insinuates himself into a group of teen skateboard enthusiasts at the local skate shop.

Spending hours on their skateboards perfecting tricks, often in prohibited enclaves of the city, and listening to hip-hop, these boys are seeking to escape whatever they feel is oppressing them (poverty, familial abuse, parental expectations, or neglect). This new crew gives Stevie -- dubbed Sunburn by the others -- a sense of family and belonging he doesn't get from his distracted mother and repressed older brother. Except that, other than dreadlocked ringleader and skateshop proprietor Ray (Na-Kel Smith), the rest of this crew are clueless, questing kids who engage in raunchy debates, give each other bad advice, and drink and drug at escalating rates. Ray's best friend and the charismatic center of the film is a character called Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt), so named for his favorite expletive, a blonde-ringleted slacker whom Stevie admires as being the ultimate in "cool." There's also Stevie's friend-turned-foe Ruben (Gio Galicia) and the laconic Fourth Grade (Ryder McLoughlin), named for his intellectual level, who dreams of being a filmmaker and carries his camera everywhere.

Stevie is ready to put himself out there, prove himself any way he can, and he's willing to risk life and limb to do it. Already the brunt of his brother's violence, Stevie cracks his head open falling off a rooftop in a skateboarding dare, a move that gains him the admiration of the crew, and privately engages in self-harm to toughen himself further. "You take the hardest hits of anyone I know," muses Ray toward the film's conclusion. "You know you don't have to do that, right?"

The film showers affection on the era before computers riveted teen culture: skateboards, party hip-hop, oversized jeans, and the kind of aimless angst that made "Smells Like Teen Spirit" a breakout hit for Curt Cobain and crew. Mixed by race and ethnic origin, the group likes to freely throw around the n-word. For a film about the mid 1990s, key scenes are driven by music outside of that era, as in a sequence as the crew skates down the median of a busy thoroughfare to strains of the Mamas & the Papas' "Dedicated To The One I Love" from 1967 and Herbie Hancock's version of "Watermelon Man" from 1974. Trent Reznor contributed original music, and there are a number of other 90s hip-hop tracks quoted.

The film casts a reminiscent glow on Stevie's pubescent milestones, like his first cigarette, first drink, first sexual encounter, and first drug experience. Viewing this as an adult who came of age two decades earlier, I had significant trouble watching the child-sized Suljic in a sexual encounter at a party with a girl who looked to be way over 16, ingesting drugs freely handed to him by Fuckshit while Ray merely shakes his head, and climbing into a car driven by an obviously too-high Fuckshit with predictable results. (My inner thoughts: This has got to be illegal, this is child abuse, where is this actor's mother, etc.)

The movie tries to tie everything up with a bow. Stevie's mother Dabney, alarmed by Stevie's behavior and this new group of friends, at first tries to prohibit her son from associating with them, but Stevie rebels and resists. Mom finally relents once she sees how devoted they are as Stevie lands in the hospital. Stevie's brother attempts a form of reconciliation with his sibling. And the mostly wordless Fourth Grade finally shares the video documentary he's been working on, appropriately titled "Mid90s."

Watching this I was reminded that every generation thinks its teen years were deeply poignant, significant, and unique. I certainly have felt that way about my own experience, but watching Mid90s, with which I couldn't really relate, I realized that it's a universally human conceit. But Mid90s did show me -- who grew up in a household of females -- how often boys are conditioned to masculinity through the idea that they must cultivate their ability to not only survive physical challenges and violence, but to seek them out.

Not bad for a first effort, but Hill should turn his directorial vision outward for his next project.