And that’s totally fair, you know, but it’s been amazing to have their support and actually show people the film. “And it was hard at first because, you know, Jason Dilland Bill Strobeck, who are friends of mine, were openly talking the most shit. “The scariest screening we had was the Thrasher screening,” Hill said of the LA premiere last month done in partnership with the magazine.
Skateboarders are notoriously sensitive about how they’re shown on film thanks to decades of hamfisted portrayals that flatten skateboarding and skateboarders into ridiculous stereotypes. Obviously, unless you were like Spike or a few other people you wouldn’t know how much this had affected my life because I didn’t go around repping skateboarding. “And no one was more aware of that than me. “Part of the thing was like, 'Oh skateboarding is gonna hear the kid from Superbad is gonna make some movie about skateboarding, it’s gonna be trash,'" he told me at the A24 offices last week. The challenge of accurately portraying these feelings on a big screen-and the risk that skaters would brutally clown on him if he fucked it up-was not lost on Hill, who grew up skating in Los Angeles. For my money Mid90s is the first mainstream-ish film to capture the feeling of popping an ollie for the first time or the dramatic rollercoaster of emotions that come from finding yourself sprinting full-speed, heart pounding, from the cops seconds after enjoying a lazy session with friends in an abandoned schoolyard. It’s difficult to convey just how much skateboarding means to the people who love it without using religious allegories, and when most films try they fail miserably, coming across as overwrought or cliched in a way that’s cringeworthy to anyone who's ever been consumed by the culture.
In Ray’s case, it was enough to lift him out of the depression left by his brother’s death, and in Stevie’s it allowed him to find a tribe of people who accepted him for who he was, and offered an escape from his troubled home life. Where Mid90s really shines, though, is in the way it’s able to paint a portrait of what skateboarding means to its most fervent participants and the influence it holds over them. It’s a powerful exploration of teen (and pre-teen) angst and an illuminating look at the way kids discover themselves through their friends. Ray, Fuckshit, Fourth Grade, and Ruben welcome him into their crew, helping him in life as much as in skateboarding. An exceedingly quiet and seemingly lonely kid, Stevie finds acceptance with a group of misfits at an LA skate shop called Motor Avenue.
On its surface, M id90s is a snapshot of a kid trapped in a difficult and sometimes violent household he's trying desperately to escape.
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