Review: Mid90s

Mid90s (15)

USA 2018  85 mins  Dir Jonah Hill  Cast: Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges, Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Gio Galicia

The nostalgic period coming-of-age movie is always a balancing act. By evoking a particular era or subculture through music and pop culture references, you offer warm fuzzies to those who were part of it but risk alienating everyone else by privileging fetishised authenticity over character and story. Hit the sweet spot and you can actually make audiences feel a nostalgic glow for experiences they never had. The standard to aim for here is Richard Linklater’s masterpiece Dazed and Confused – a film that’s impossible to watch without wishing you’d grown up in the sun-drenched suburbs of Texas, circa 1976. Even Linklater himself struggled to match this with his thematic companion piece Everybody Wants Some !!

https://youtu.be/X80JOq0lKCM

A graduate of the Judd Apatow school of comedy, Jonah Hill’s directorial debut wastes no time in establishing its setting. Hey – the clue’s in the title. Specifically, we’re in LA’s mid-90s skateboard scene. Just feel that period detail as Hill’s camera sweeps lovingly along a shelf of hip-hop CDs and pauses to take in then-fashionable sports logo attire and Slick Rick magazine covers. Despite all the street slang and copious use of the N-word, connoisseurs of this genre should be able to orient themselves easily thanks to such familiar archetypes as the long-haired stoner dude and the naïve, impressionable kid whose initiation provides our way in to this arcane subculture.

Said kid is sweet-faced 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic – last seen in The House with a Clock in Its Walls and The Killing of a Sacred Deer) who endures an unhappy home life with his single mum Dabney (Waterston) and raging, abusive older brother Ian (Hedges). Little wonder he seeks new friends further afield in what swiftly turns into a very familiar alternative family story. Stevie is introduced to the disadvantaged multicultural milieu of the local skate shop by a slightly older kid named Ruben (Galicia), who offers dubious advice on etiquette (don’t thank anyone for anything, for example, or they’ll think you’re gay). Their charismatic, philosophising leader is Ray (Smith), who might just be good enough to skate his way out of the ghetto. His best mate is the wayward, self-destructive, delightfully named chick magnet Fuckshit (Prenatt). And everything they say or do is obsessively filmed by the taciturn, acne-scarred Fourth Grade (McLaughlin), supplying an obvious payoff at the end of the movie.

Shot American Honey-style in Academy ratio, which supposedly encourages our intimate engagement with these characters, Mid90s is at its best in observing the nicely played friendship and shifting dynamics within the group as dim Ruben is gently usurped by eager-to-please Stevie, while Fuckshit fears the loss of his only meaningful friendship when Ray flirts with a pair of pro skaters. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the fact that very little actually happens as these kids shoot the shit, skate, and shoot the shit some more, Hill shoehorns in a bit of drama occasioned by Stevie’s need to impress his new buddies with foolhardiness. A few sequences of self-harm feel a little jarring, as though parachuted in from a different, more serious social drama. You’ll look in vain for an F-Rating too. Women are mostly absent from this world, and when they are present it’s generally to admire the chaps or facilitate Stevie’s fumbling first sexual experience.

Overall, Mid90s is a solid, well-acted, minor contribution to the genre, with nothing much new to say. Its main misfortune is to be released in the wake of two superior skateboarding flicks: Crystal Moselle’s none-more-woke all-female Skate Kitchen and Bing Liu’s acclaimed documentary Minding the Gap.