mid90s (2018)

For a film so committed to the texture of 1996 Los Angeles, mid90s arrives with remarkably little to sell. Jonah Hill's debut shoots in 4:3 on Super 16mm, casts actual skateboarders alongside trained actors, and lets the camera sit in the back seat while teenage boys say terrible things to each other. The result is a mood piece about a thirteen-year-old named Stevie, an abusive brother, a tired mother, and a crew at the Motor Avenue Skateshop that offers him belonging at a price. Hill has said he is not a moralist. The film believes him.

The crew is racially mixed, and Hill cast real skaters such as Na-kel Smith without ever stopping to announce it. That quiet is the point, and it keeps the film's representational gestures modest. Meanwhile the dialogue is thick with homophobic and racist slurs, deployed as period furniture. Sam Adams of Slate called them a cheap shortcut to verisimilitude, which is fair. The women in Stevie's orbit, his mother and the older girl Estee, hover at the edges of a story that belongs to the boys, and the film has drawn criticism for the misogyny it declines to correct. Poverty shows up too: Fourth Grade cannot afford socks. Nobody turns that into an argument about class.

Instruction, however, is not this film's business. There is no environmental conscience here, no body politics, no reframing of the historical record, no lecture waiting at the end of the third act. Stevie's self-harm and the group's casual cruelty are presented as facts of adolescence, not as teaching moments. Even the ending, a hospital room and a homemade skate tape, withholds judgment. This is a nostalgic object built with real craft and almost no thesis. As cultural documents go, it is a skate video with a budget, and it knows it.