Film review: ‘Mid90s’

Life, as they say, comes at you fast. Jonah Hill, the tubby boy who played Michael Cera’s chum in the 2007 teen comedy “Superbad,” has grown up to direct his own movie on the travails of teenagers called “Mid90s.”

The new film relies far more on drama than the Apatowian comedy that buoyed Hill’s early career. This is apparent from the shocking opening shot, in which 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is thrown against a wall and beaten by his older brother Ian, played by Hollywood go-to problem teen, Lucas Hedges.

After the thrashing, Stevie decides, with the reasonless certainty often shown by young people, that he will change all his interests and friends. His Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles posters come down, his Ren & Stimpy T-shirt comes off, and Stevie sets off to redefine himself as a skate rat.

He finds his new crew by sitting down in a skate shop and not leaving until the other kids talk to him. In this way, he meets Ruben (Gio Galicia), a scarred boy who teaches Stevie the lingo needed to interact with the others. The videographer of the crew is called Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin) for reasons that probably related to an undiagnosed learning disability. In an editor’s nightmare, there is a skater known only as F---s--- (Olan Prenatt), the guy with the best hair and access to a motor vehicle. In the midst of dropping out of high school, he declares himself devoted only to smoking, skating, and… having brief, noncommittal relationships with women.

Then there’s Ray (Na-Kel Smith, a professional skateboarder and, apparently, a natural thespian), the most talented and most soulful of the skaters. Amid the crew’s cacophony of homophobic and racist slurs, he occasionally calls out the other kids for their immaturity, for “being corny.” With his penetrating gaze and ease around the camera, Smith feels like the biggest discovery in the picture. And he delivers the best line to Stevie: “You take the hardest hits.”

Stevie absorbs all these blows while living with his mother (Katherine Waterston), and we don’t understand her current or past circumstances, beyond presumably being a single mother. Why is her home so filled with screaming and vicious assaults? The violence Ian inflicts on Stevie is hard to watch because it is so severe and unmotivated. Ian is defined by his oversized polos, hoop earrings and hip hop CD collection, not by any backstory, or even more than a few sentences of dialogue.

Stevie weighs perhaps 70 pounds and stands about a foot shorter than his costars, which makes it more shocking to watch him take punches, smoke weed and slurp malt liquor. When he goes into a bedroom with the older Estee (Alexa Demie) at a party, it doesn’t feel like a fun hookup, it feels like child endangerment. Suljic is far from reaching the defining pinnacle of the along-for-the-ride little brother type - Wiley Wiggins in “Dazed and Confused.”

Despite several sequences in which skating is the main activity, the film reveals nothing about the craft of skateboarding. Thus “Mid90s” falls well short of the year’s best skate film: Bing Liu’s magisterial “Minding the Gap.” In Liu’s beautifully edited documentary, we see how skate cinematography and violent trauma can be enmeshed at a much higher level.

As a director, Hill can’t build momentum from scene to scene. The family sequences are flat and the skating crew’s dialogue is hit-or-miss. Though Hill does show a good feel for the way friendships come together and fall apart among teens, his stabs at catharsis are unearned - despite the affecting earnestness of the players.