The skateboard kids who couldn’t escape adulthood

THE exuberance and daring of skateboarders racing through deserted streets and flipping their boards off buildings is the exhilarating start to Bing Liu’s exceptional documentary.

But Bing’s wheel-grinding, kerbleaping footage takes a darker turn as he films the home lives of fellow skateboarders in povertystricken Rockford, Illinois.

Liu began as an amateur, making early YouTube videos of his mates, then, as he grew older, focusing on two in particular: 17-year-old kitchen porter African-American Keire Johnson, and Zack Mulligan, a 23-year-old roofer about to have a baby with his girlfriend, Nina Bowgren.

The lads’ beer and dope-fuelled camaraderie begins to diminish as adult burdens intervene.

There is little hope for advancement in Rockford, and Zack finds himself in a rented room, with a squalling baby and a dead-end job as he and his girlfriend grow increasingly irritated with each other. Keire, too, struggles with a family which lacks a father or any direction, and Bing’s own story as a Chinese immigrant with a violent, unpredictable and eventually absent father emerges.

Domestic violence and neglect is the underpinning for all these families, and the documentary is riveting in its intimacy.

CRADLE Of Champions follows three amateur boxers aiming for fame and professional or Olympic status in New York’s Golden Gloves tournament.

There’s nothing new in this documentary, as James Wilkins and Titus Williams face off in the men’s fight, and 24-year-old single mum Nisa Rodriguez takes her own Rocky road.

But boxing fans will enjoy the brutal training and moving stories before the final clash.