Mid90s

Early on in Jonah Hill's directorial debut, which concerns a young kid named Stevie (Sunny Suljic), trying to find his way with a group of vagabond skateboarders in L.A., he's furiously practicing basic tricks in the concrete backyard of his mother's house one night as his mom ("Blockbuster night!") watches Scorsese's Goodfellas on their TV.

The reference might be lost on the kid, a tabula rasa culturally, who spends hours in his jerkweed older brother's room when he's not there, poring over his stacks of hip-hop CDs and back issues of The Source, but it's not lost on us: As young Henry Hill aspired to be a wiseguy, ingratiating himself with the local Mafia, young Stevie, eventually dubbed "Sunburn," wants nothing more than to be a skater, hanging with a ragtag crew of older kids, including Ruben (Gio Galicia), a kid closer to his age; Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin, a high schooler who wants to make movies; another high schooler (Olan Prenatt), a hard-partying bruh whose nickname cannot be printed in a family paper; and the defacto leader, Ray (Na-kel Smith), a supremely talented skater, who has real aspirations of turning pro.

To their credit, the crew accepts Stevie pretty readily, first by Ruben, then by the others, to Ruben's growing dissatisfaction, and soon he's shakily skating down the meridian of a four-way boulevard with them, drinking 40s, smoking weed, and messing around with older high school girls. None of this sits well with his mom (Katherine Waterston), a single mother preoccupied with her own romantic dealings; or his raging brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges), whose routine beat down of Stevie opens the film.

That's not the only punishment Stevie takes: In addition to getting routinely wrecked on his board as he tries to master very basic tricks, Stevie also has a penchant for self-abuse, pinching his chest until it's red and raw, harshly scraping his upper leg with the stiff quills of a hairbrush, and so forth. It isn't clear exactly to what end this is intended: Is it self-directed corrective punishment to keep him from doing worse behavior, or a desire to feel pain as a sort of psychic salve? It's an interesting character insight, which fits in nicely with his skating aesthetic, where he's nearly constantly eating asphalt in copious amounts, a fact noted by Ray, who marvels at the constant pounding the kid can endure.

What Hill is after is a bit nebulous by design. You could certainly see it as a coming of age affair -- Stevie does hook up with a sultry high school girl (Alexa Demie), as it happens; as his beleaguered mother complains that they never talk anymore -- but Hill consciously eschews anything that feels momentous, keeping all emotions on the down-low. The happiest we ever see Stevie is when he finally completes a basic kick-flip in his backyard, the rest of the film, he's trying to restrain himself from showing too much of any emotion, other than hostility toward his mother.

Are we seeing different forces wrestling for his soul? At one point, coerced by his brother, he steals a wad of bills out of his mother's bureau, but when confronted by her the next day, even as Ian has already confessed for the both of them, he denies it outright. But even as he seems to drag farther down the path toward self-destruction, it's clear his skating is becoming more of an outlet for his aggression.

In one of the film's few extended dialogues, Ray points out at length the hardships he and the rest of the crew continue to face, including the tragic death of his younger brother a couple of years before, as he gently suggests the solution to these massive obstacles is the simple joy and free expression of skating.

It is in these moments -- the crew cruising down the street on their boards, or in one illegal, cobbled-together park along with a slew of like-minded teens -- that Hill's film feels the most focused and joyous, while retaining the vibe of being tossed together on a kind of whim. Hill wisely keeps hints of an agenda far away from his narrative, which is designed to feel more raw and ramshackle than measured, and as a result, he gets points for his verite approach.

The trouble is, the material makes for a pretty engaging couple of acts, but not much of an ending. It's well put together, with an eager and eclectic cast, which gives it a properly rollicking feel, but Hill's disdain for dramatics also affords him little room to gain and/or lose momentum. The ending happens almost as an afterthought, but instead of creating a sort of Cassavettes-like postmodernist vibe, it cuts so abruptly and with so little actually at stake, it seems more slight than it needed to be.

You could see it as a mark of honor that Hill, in making his first film, steers clear of making something more obviously attraction seeking. He's like a kid making a 'zine in his bedroom out of nothing but love for his subject.

The film has a shaggy resiliency that works surprisingly well, but it still feels cut too far to the bone to really work as a progressive narrative. It's not that nothing takes place -- and it certainly isn't shoe-gazey or self-preoccupied -- but what does happen is so muted and unexplored, it doesn't carry much weight, either.

In Scorsese's Goodfellas, we see the rise and fall of Henry Hill, and his enduring the unforgettable denouement, standing in line like the rest of the "shnooks," the price he pays for wanting so much to be part of something intoxicating and hopelessly corrupt, in his craving for power and money.

For young Stevie, maybe it's enough just to have some guys around to help pick him up from the pavement after yet another sick face plant.

MovieStyle on 10/26/2018