Jonah Hill’s hymn to the Nineties
Mid90s 15 cert, 85 min ★★★★★ Dir Jonah Hill
Starring Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges, Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder Mclaughlin, Gio Galicia
Is there a word for the opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, it crackles away in every frame of Jonah Hill’s
Mid90s, which feels less like a wistful glance at its director’s youth than a relic from it only recently unearthed. Hill is the formerly chunky comic actor known for Superbad and The Wolf of
Wall Street, but his directorial debut isn’t as broad as you might expect.
Rather, it’s an admirably low-key coming-of-age piece set in the litterblown sprawl of Los Angeles 20-some years ago, where doe-eyed 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is seeking his niche. His elder brother Ian (Lucas Hedges) is a bully and a loner, while his mother (Katherine Waterston) is loving but always slightly absent. Setting his sights instead on the older boys larking around outside the local skate shop, Stevie decides to passively befriend them, and hovers on the edge of their personal space until they wave him in.
Played by Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt, Ryder Mclaughlin and Gio Galicia, they’re an appealing, wellobserved pick-and-mix of types: Ray (Smith) is the de facto leader with a caring streak and the skating skills to potentially go pro; Fourth Grade (Mclaughlin) a budding filmmaker of limited academic capacity; Ruben (Garcia) a wiry, crop-haired nuisance who clearly savours no longer being the youngest member of the group.
Then there’s Prenatt’s character, a gregarious slacker whose nickname can’t be reproduced here without six asterisks, and which doubles as his go-to double-expletive whenever one of the others pulls off a trick.
Like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Mid90s is clearly informed by its writer-director’s own teenage years, though it’s less geared towards intimate character study than it is a pin-sharp evocation of time and place. Hill’s film quietly notices things that barely count as period detail, but are oddly resonant nonetheless, such as the huge plastic water bottles the kids swig from. We’re by Stevie’s side during most of the usual coming-of-age firsts, including a clinch at a house party that recalls Larry Clark’s Kids – a blazingly controversial teen-skate-culture film which actually was made in the mid-nineties, but Hill makes it sweet rather than provocative.
The script is peppered with Hill’s trademark abrasive humour, but it cares less about making you laugh than enveloping you in the moment, even when the moments consist of nothing more than killed time. After its slight 85 minutes had passed, I wasn’t sure how much of it had mattered. It was a lovely, strangely reassuring feeling.