Skating through the tricky time in life
The 1990s are within the memories of most of the people currently alive, and yet these years already feel like the distant past. The middle of the decade was marked by the mainstream adoption of the internet and the vast shift of social interactions that ensued.
The actor Jonah Hill acknowledges this with Mid90s, his lo-fi feature debut as writer and director, which is titled and situated for that time just before all things turned digital and connected-yet-disconnected. (The film is shot on 16mm, giving it a pleasingly uneven texture similar to its topic.)
Hill is also addressing a similar void in a boy’s life: that gap between childhood and adulthood when everybody is telling you to grow up but nobody seems willing to take you seriously.
Mid90s surveys the scene through the eyes of sullen preteen Stevie, played by Sunny Suljic, who is currently on big
screens in the fairy tale horror The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Hill likely sees a lot of himself in Stevie, since he was about the same age in the mid-1990s and he’s played awkward characters in films like Superbad.
Stevie is not having a great life, in the rundown L.A. neighbourhood where he uncomfortably abides. He’s constantly being beaten up by his older brother
Ian (Lucas Hedges) for one transgression or another, mostly to do with Stevie’s fascination for his bro’s impressive collection of rap CDs, the same music that informs the era-specific soundtrack that includes a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (With occasional exceptions: a tune by the Mamas & the Papas sticks out like a sore thumb.)
Stevie’s hard-pressed single
mom (Katherine Waterston) has too much on her mind to be of much help or comfort to her troubled youngest son.
Stevie falls in with a gang of neighbourhood knuckleheads, the kind who are content to spend the entire day skateboarding down any available strip of concrete, legally or not, while calling each other “gay” if they show any signs of wanting to be civilized.
His new pals include the wound-up Ruben (Gio Galicia), acne-scarred and academically challenged Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), curly tressed profane dude F- -S- -t (Olan Prenatt) and the group’s lone African-American, Ray (Na-Kel Smith), who is the most thoughtful member of the group.
“A lot of the time we feel like our lives are the worst,” Ray tells Stevie, in a philosophical moment. “But I think if you look in anybody else’s closet, you wouldn’t trade your s- -t for their s- -t.”
That’s about as deep as Mid90s gets. Stevie, nicknamed Sunburn for the dumbest of reasons, gets up to various shenanigans with his new pals, as his bro Ian looks on with fear and jealousy.
Things like stealing money so Stevie can buy his own skateboard, experimenting with drugs and alcohol and chatting up girls with the same intent as Hill’s character in Superbad.
The film may not have much of a story, but it’s agreeably resistant to any attempt to caution or lecture. It just observes, as young rebel movies have since the dawn of cinema, that life is something that happens while you’re busy trying to skate around it.