"Mid90s"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Stevie (Sunny Suljic)—a 13-year-old boy growing up in LA in the mid-90s—is a sweet kid. But he doesn’t have anyone to look up to. His dad is gone. His mom is, well, mom. And his older brother is just about the biggest tool in the shed.

So I guess it’s no surprise that Stevie looks elsewhere for role models. And, to his mom’s chagrin, what he finds is a bunch of foul-mouthed skateboarders. Ray (Na-kel) is the leader of the pack. He’s the best skateboarder—he’s really good—and he’s also the coolest. Then F_S_ (Olan Prenatt) is next in age, talent, and coolness level. He’s the clown of the group. Whereas Ray is serious about his skating—he wants to go pro—F_S_ just wants to skate and party and not take anything too seriously. He thinks trying too hard is “cheesy”.

Then there is Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), who is mostly-quiet, videos everything, and apparently got his name because he’s only as smart as a fourth grader. Finally, there’s Ruben (Gio Galicia), a somewhat younger kid with a stony, brash exterior, but maybe only because he has some serious stuff going on at home (which he rarely visits).

That’s the crew. You get some vague sense that they go to school some of the time, but, really, it’s like the never ending summer for these skateboarders. They skate and hangout and skate and party (booze, cigarettes, drugs, girls) and skate, skate, skate until the sun goes down.

All this skating in “Mid90s” is occasionally interrupted with the awkward, sometimes poignant, moments that constitute growing up. Stevie has his first beer. He hooks up with a girl for the first time. He fights with his brother, but then has a talk about how their parents let them down. He hears about how Ruben’s dad beats him, how Fourth Grade can barely afford socks, and about how the tragedies in Ray’s family dwarf anything he has ever experienced.

Most of these characters are likable in their own ways. Despite teenagers in general being, well, the worst, it’s hard not to fall in love (actually, better say like) with some of these kids.

However, this is a short movie—only 84 minutes. So there’s not a lot of time for character development—especially the gradual, trickling character development that’s required for a coming-of-age movie like this. Aside from maybe Stevie and Ray, we are only left with hints of depth—we see a rag-tag bunch of larks that promise, but don’t really reveal, roundness of character.

Most coming-of-age flicks are all about the characters. “Mid90s” is also all about the nostalgia—about Super Nintendo, skateboarding videos, baggy jeans, and Nike high tops. This movie is bathed in the past, which, I expect, will be most effective for those of us who actually grew up in the mid-1990s.

This movie also reminds you—or me, at least—of how annoying teenagers are. Yeah, awkward moments can be charming. And, yeah, yeah, I know being carefree and even irresponsible is just part of growing up. Nonetheless, as I sit here on this side of puberty, watching and hearing these kids who, definitely more than average teens, are reckless, troubled, aimless, and often just plain mean, I can’t help but sympathize with Stevie’s mom, who thinks this particular gang of misfits ought to be disbanded.

I know we are supposed to feel that, dammit, these are Stevie’s people and that’s how it goes and that’s so important. But when is too much too much? Given how these kids are portrayed in the movie, I don’t know that I could fault Stevie’s mom if she decided to move to the middle of nowhere, or send her son to boarding school, or something—anything!

And I think all of this speaks to an awkward (though not necessarily damning) tension in Jonah Hill’s debut filmmaking. It’s kind of like the tension between Ray and F_S_—Ray is serious about what he does; F_S_ thinks being serious about anything is cheesy. Jonah Hill doesn’t seem quite sure whether he wants to be serious—whether he wants to make some point or rather just have some fun making a movie.

Much of the movie feels like the latter—like he’s just showing us, and reminding us, how it was growing up in a certain time and place. But then there are more serious moments, too, and, to give voice to the F_S_ side of me, many of these moments teeter, though maybe don’t quite topple, into cheesiness.

So what would I say about Jonah Hill’s first attempt at writing/directing? Uneven. But I would also say it shows promise. Maybe, hopefully, this movie is as much part of a coming-of-age tale—with all the usual awkwardness and bad decision-making—for its filmmaker as it is for its characters.