Nothing cooking in ‘Skate Kitchen’
“Skate Kitchen” is a narrative feature about young female skateboarders in Manhattan. It’s directed by Crystal Moselle, the documentarian who made “The Wolfpack,” and the new film has some documentary-like qualities. The women in it are skateboarders, and they’re part of a real-life group called Skate Kitchen. And the locations where they all hang out? Those are real, too. The only things not real are the names and the story.
The good thing that might have come from this is a drama with the immediacy of a documentary, but that’s not what happens here. Instead, we get the vague, free-floating, fly-onthe-wall feeling of a documentary, while knowing the conversations and the circumstances aren’t real. There’s no extra information to make sense of or contextualize the filming of these women in the first place. It’s just one meaningless scene followed by another.
There’s no story. There’s something that might be called a story, but there’s no dramatic push to it, no shaping of incidents over the course of a narrative. It’s all terribly bland and without interest. Yet more surprising is the fact that there are no great skateboarding scenes.
The plot is built around Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), an 18-year-old from Long Island who discovers a posse of likeminded skateboarders when she gets on the train and goes to the city, Her immigrant mother objects to her skateboarding, so that leads to an estrangement. No matter, Camille has found her people, and, in between shifts at her minimum wage job, they hang out and practice their moves.
And that — aside from a manufactured, obligatory, contrived and unconvincing argument scene — is about it in terms of story. The scenes go nowhere. If you want to hang out with skateboarders, male and female, without their noticing you and without ever having to say something, this is pretty much the experience of “Skate Kitchen.”
Most of the movie consists of watching other people lie about. They have nothing interesting to say. Half the time they tell each other about things we have already seen in previous scenes.
As an exploration and celebration of a subculture, the movie fails. The people don’t seem especially bright or interesting. Whatever fascination Moselle felt for this world doesn’t come across in the movie. Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s film critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle