Hill’s debut is a paean to its period

A coming-of-age tale about a 13-year-old from a dysfunctional family who finds an identity through skateboarding, 21 Jump Street star Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is nothing if not studious in its evocation of its eponymous period setting.

As distractingly fetishistic about the 1990s as Stranger Things is about the 1980s, the La-set film lingers over meticulously curated pop-culture ephemera, grooves to meticulously curated soundtrack cuts (The Pixies, Wu Tang Clan, Nirvana, The Pharcyde) and replicates the cinematic aesthetics of the era by using 16mm film stock and Hi8 video with fish-eye lenses to respectively capture the grainy look of the indie movies coming through Sundance and the rough-and-ready skate videos Spike Jonze was pioneering.

Even its wayward-teens-skateboarding milieu is a wholesale lift from Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s 1995 controversy magnet Kids. The big question is whether this is all in service to the story or Hill’s determination to announce himself as a credible artist. In truth, it’s a little of both.

The journey of Stevie (Sunny Suljic), its barely teenage protagonist, is a familiar one, but the skateboarding scenes are majestic and Hill is good at burying melodramatic plot turns with inventive flourishes to ensure we see the world through Stevie’s eyes.

For all its rawness, though, there’s an affected authenticity to its depiction of marginalised teens that suggests Hill is better at approximating edgy depictions of that world than representing those who live in it.