SKATING THROUGH LIFE
Hill takes nostalgic trip in L.A. coming-of-age tale ‘Mid90s’
Making his feature film directing debut, twotime Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill (“The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Moneyball”) pulls off quite a feat with a semi-autobiographical portrait of his coming-of-age in the mean-streets, skateboarding subculture of West Los Angeles. Hill, who also wrote the screenplay, is filled in for by the charismatic young actor Sunny Suljic (“The House with a Clock in its Walls”). He’s Stevie, a super-bushyhaired, 13-year-old lowermiddle-class kid with a great smile. We first see Stevie getting the stuffing knocked out of him by his much bigger, troubled older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges, “Manchester by the Sea”), over Ian’s PlayStation. Their young, single mother, Dabney (Katherine Waterston) is a bit of a flake and bit of a tramp. But she means well, even if she can barely provide a roof over their heads. Stevie yearns to fit in and notices a group of mostly older, multicultural local kids on skateboards, who are hanging around the Motor Avenue Skate Shop. He befriends the youngest, Ruben (Gio Galicia), whose mother abuses him and his sister and who will eventually resent Stevie. Stevie also tries to learn to ride a skateboard, a big board with pink wheels that he trades Ian for, in his backyard in scenes that are a real-life Buster Keaton comedy.
The older kids include one named for the two swear words he most often utters when he starts a sentence (played by Olan Prenatt) and Ray (a breakout Na-kel Smith), an affable, supercool skater, who is maybe even good enough to get pro sponsorship and takes to the little new kid, nicknaming him “Sunburn.” Another member of the group is Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), who films the group’s activities with a camcorder (hence the boxy-shaped images). One of the most appealing elements of “Mid90s” is how Hill nurtures the acting skills and natural bonding of his pro and non-pro cast and turns this disparate group into a real band of skater brothers. Like most realistic childhood tales, “Mid90s” is full of teenage-wasteland-like things that children often do not survive in real life. Stevie falls off a rooftop perform- ing a daredevil stunt in one scene, does drugs and alcohol in another scene in which he has his first sexual experience and finally experiences that uniquely L.A. rite of passage, a potentially deadly freeway crash. In a series of revelations, Stevie learns from Ray that while life is not great for Stevie, it is even worse for some of his new friends, something that has surely shaped Hill as a human being, actor and filmmaker. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and a selection of 1990s hip-hop adds to the immersive sense of the decade of Hill’s childhood. Is “Mid90s” Hill’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”? Yes, it is, although it’s also more than a little bit of a modern day “Tom Sawyer,” and it is one of the season’s most pleasant surprises.
(“Mid90s” contains underage drinking and drug use, sexually suggestive scenes and language profanity and violence.)